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 LIBRARY 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Received *-^7%^t<f£^ 1 88 £ , 
 
 Actessiojis No. ti^X^i^ Shelf No. 
 
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 ORIENTAL RELIGIONS, and their Relation to Universal Religion. 
 
 I. INDIA. 8vo, $5.00 ; half calf, $8.00. 
 II. CHINA. 8vo, $5.00; half calf, $8.00. 
 III. PERSIA. 8vo, $5.00; half calf, $8.00. 
 
 The set, cloth, 515.00; half calf, $24.00. 
 
 LECTURES, ESSAYS, AND SERMONS. With a Portrait, and Memoir 
 by Rev. S.\MUEL Longfellow. Crown Svo, gilt top, $1.75. 
 
 HYMNS OF THE SPIRIT. By Samuel Longfellow and Samuel 
 Johnson. i6mo, roan, $1.23. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, 
 BOSTON. 
 
ORIENTAL RELIGIONS. 
 
Oriental Religions 
 
 AND THEIR 
 
 RELATION TO UNIVERSAL 
 RELIGION 
 
 By SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 By O. B. FROTHINGHAM 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 kllPnr^^S^ 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN, AND COMPANY 
 
 New York: ii East Seventeenth Street 
 
 i88s 
 
Copyright, 18S4, 
 By Anna Johnson Haskell. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PERSIA. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 vii 
 
 Introduction 
 
 Topical Analysis ^"^ 
 
 I. 
 
 ADVENT OF THE RELIGION OF PERSONAL WILL. 
 ITS ELEMENTS. 
 
 I. Syivibolism 5 
 
 II. The Moral Sense 37 
 
 II. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 I. AvESTAN Dualism 53 
 
 II. Morality of the Avesta 109 
 
 III. Zarathustra ^21 
 
 IV. The Avesta Literature i43 
 
 V. Cuneiform Monuiments of the Accadian and the 
 
 Assyrian ^^^ 
 
 VI. The Hebrew and the Chaldean 219 
 
VI CONTENTS. 
 
 III. 
 
 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Babylon, Cyrus, Persia 281 
 
 II. Alexander the Great 357 
 
 III. The Sassanian Empire 393 
 
 IV. 
 
 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 I. MANICHiEISM 441 
 
 11. Gnosticism 501 
 
 V. 
 
 ISLAM. 
 
 I. Mahomet 525 
 
 IL The Shah-Nameh ; or Book of Kings 711 
 

 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 'THHIS is the last volume of Mr. Johnson's projected 
 work on " Oriental Religions." The first volume, 
 " India," appeared in 1872. An intimate friend of the 
 author of " The Light of Asia," one familiar with his 
 thoughts, a fine scholar himself, a student, too, in this 
 department, speaks of it thus : " His [Mr. Johnson's] 
 sketch of Buddha and Buddhism is one of the profound- 
 est, wisest, justest estimates yet given." The second vol- 
 ume, "China," was published in 1877. George Ripley 
 reviewed it at length and heartily in the " Tribune," 
 praising the writer's freedom from sectarian temper, and 
 his devotion to the interests of truth. His friend, Samuel 
 Longfellow, noticed the book in the "Atlantic," rendering 
 it no more than justice. Professor E. J. Eitel, of Tubingen 
 and Hong-Kong, writing in the " China Review " of 
 April 21, 1882, says of Mr. Johnson, whose death he is 
 commemorating: — 
 
 " His volume on the Religions of India, which appeared in 1872, 
 has been highly praised by Orientalists of European fame ; and I make 
 bold to say that his great work on China will commend itself to all 
 sinologists as a most exhaustive, lucid, and correct estimate of Chinese 
 thought and life. If it is due to Edkins to say that he has established 
 for China her true place in philology, it is due to Samuel Johnson to 
 acknowledge that he has fixed China's place in the history of Uni- 
 
viii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 versal Religion. ... If I add that Samuel Johnson's method of inquiry 
 was thoroughly scientific, that his sympathies were absolutely cosmo- 
 politan, while essentially religious, and that he laid down the results 
 of his most painstaking inquiries in a style which carries the reader 
 right along, fascinating as it is by its vivacity and sparkling lucidity, 
 while intensely suggestive and instructive, I can but wonder that his 
 countrymen in the United States did not give him that place among 
 the foremost writers, thinkers, and scholars of the present day which 
 he so fully deserves." 
 
 The Notes for the "Persia" were begun in 1877. In 
 February, 1878, he says in a letter: " This theme is largest 
 of all. I should call it Iran rather than Persia, but shall 
 not. I am back among the cuneiform tablets and the 
 sources, as I find more and more, of the religious history 
 of the world, and especially of the great ' historic faiths.' " 
 In February, 1880, he writes: " I get on with my * Persia' 
 as well as I could expect, having this winter been wrestling 
 with the obscure and impalpable relations of Manichgeism 
 and Gnosticism with the early Christian Church. Now I 
 am on the pleasanter track of the Shdh-Ndmeh, and at the 
 doors of Sufism, etc." 
 
 How early Mr. Johnson began his Oriental studies, it is 
 difficult to tell with exactness. It could hardly have been 
 later than the winter of 1852-53 that he gave in Salem 
 the lectures that were the germ of these volumes, and 
 nearly all of the time intervening was given to some aspect 
 of the subject. He died in February, 1882, leaving the 
 "Persia" unfinished, yet so nearly completed that a few 
 weeks of diligent work spent in revising, writing out a 
 chapter on Persian poetry, adding a paragraph here and 
 there, arranging and paging, would have sufficed to per- 
 fect his labor. The chapters are precisely as he left them. 
 Not a line has been added or taken away. So much only 
 has been done as the necessities of publication required, and 
 that was done with misgiving. The chapters dli Zoroaster, 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 Mahomet, Alexander the Great ; on Babylon, on Avestan 
 Dualism; on ManicliEeism and Gnosticism; on the SJidJi- 
 NdmeJi; the episodes on Aristotle, Cyrus, the Seleucidae, — 
 will interest and charm all readers ; for the style is elegant, 
 the language glowing, the sentiment lofty, and the insight 
 keen. It seems hardly to have been a toil, so much love 
 was in it, so absorbing a consecration. This man certainly 
 did not labor for money, for he was poorer for all he did ; 
 nor for fame, of which he got little or none ; but for truth 
 alone, or for humanity, which can live only by truth, 
 " The future," he wrote, " must determine whether I was 
 justified in undertaking so absorbing a charge. I should 
 shudder when I think of its probable doom, did I not re- 
 member that at least I have had my reward in the pleasure 
 of exploring the fields into which it has called me, and in 
 watching the flow of universal laws through history. I 
 certainly can expect no other reward ; and on the whole 
 am glad that I cannot." How far the future will justify 
 him remains to be seen. The reward he desired cannot, 
 at all events, be taken away. It is, however, to be hoped 
 that the reputation he deserved will at last be granted to 
 him ; at least, that his unselfish devotion will come to honor 
 in the world of scholarship, so that his personal friends will 
 not be the only ones to revere his character or admire his 
 genius. 
 
 There is an impression that Mr. Johnson's books are of 
 little value because he was not an Orientalist, — that is, a 
 student of Oriental languages, who obtained his knowledge 
 at first hand, from original sources. The truth of the 
 assertion is frankly admitted. The writer, though he knew 
 something of Sanscrit, was quite unacquainted with the 
 language of China or of Persia, and had never travelled 
 in the East. For himself, he deemed this no disqualifica- 
 tion for his task. " I mean," he said, " to be prepared for 
 
X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the evil fame of attempting so much without knowledge 
 of the forty thousand characters of the Chinese script. If 
 I knew these, I should know nothing else. In the way of 
 psychological interpretation, I should be simply nothing." 
 And again : " I am after the law ; give me that, and I will 
 use it where I want it. But illustrative details, except in 
 the actual \vox\6. of facts, — written details, — bore me." If 
 the impression mentioned had been made only on the 
 mind of the general public, it would be unfortunate ; when 
 made on the minds of critics it is deplorable. Yet even so 
 fair-minded a scholar as Max MiJller can lend countenance 
 to this accusation. Mr. Johnson's sincerity he cordially 
 praises, as also his honesty and accuracy. In a letter to 
 the " Index," after Mr. Johnson's death, he pays the fol- 
 lowing tribute to the deceased writer : — 
 
 " What I admire most in Samuel Johnson was his not being dis- 
 couraged by the rubbish with which the religions of the East are over- 
 whelmed, but his quietly looking for the fuiggets. And has he not 
 found them ? And has he not found what is better than ever so many 
 nuggets, — -that great, golden dawn of truth, that there is a religion 
 betiind all religions, and that happy is the man who knows it in these 
 days of materialism and atheism ? " 
 
 This warm praise is gravely qualified by the preceding 
 passage, which reads thus : — 
 
 " Samuel Johnson's knowledge of Oriental religions was at second- 
 hand ; and the little accidents that must happen to an historian or a 
 philosopher who writes on Oriental religions at second-hand are just 
 those that most exasperate Oriental scholars. . . . There are few 
 things in his volume on the Religion of India for which, at all events, 
 he could not give chapter and verse, though chapter and verse may 
 not always come from the right book." 
 
 Now nobody who knew Mr. Johnson can doubt that he 
 was acquainted with all the books there were, and with their 
 relative value. He indeed took the greatest pains to verify 
 
INTRODUCTION. xi 
 
 his authorities ; he consulted the five or six best Oriental- 
 ists in the world, who had tried their hand at translating the 
 literature of the Avcsta, and he still complained that the 
 versions were so unsatisfactory; his note-books show that 
 he was familiar with Harlez, Haug, Spiegel, Darmesteter, 
 Lenormant, Sayce, Renouf, Legge, Williams, West, the 
 " Records of the Past," the " Sacred Books of the East," 
 not to mention the comparatively popular volumes of 
 Rawlinson and Max Muller. That he could have added 
 anything in their own field to the contributions of students 
 like these, is not to be supposed. He was able to compare 
 them one with another, and divine the true meaning of 
 texts where they were at variance. 
 
 As to the right books, scholars are not agreed. Different 
 men will prefer diff"erent writings, according to their mental 
 bias. Such a question is not to be decided by knowledge 
 of a language so much as by intellectual perception, by 
 the power to penetrate beneath the letter to the interior 
 sense, and so to catch the genius of the people by a species 
 of divination which discerns at a glance the real thought. 
 This gift of insight, it is claimed, Mr. Johnson had, in ex- 
 traordinary measure. As he read, — and he was an im- 
 mense reader in English, French, German, — he pondered; 
 and, in pondering, hit upon analogies that escaped more 
 sapient breakers of stones on the road. In a letter dated 
 May 26, 1878, he writes: "I am well along in Assyrian, 
 Babylonian, and the rest of late Iranian discoveries. The 
 interest of these cuneiform revelations in their bearing on 
 Western religions, — which I find nobody, so far, among the 
 investigators has any idea of, — is surpassing." His chief 
 concern was to find the idea, the chain of connection ; and 
 he was never satisfied till he had found it, and fairly put his 
 mind upon it. He may have been mistaken ; but the mis- 
 take, if there was one, was intellectual rather than critical. 
 
XU INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A more serious charge against Mr. Johnson is that of 
 writing with a preconceived purpose to establish a certain 
 theory about rehgious development and religious creeds, 
 a fixed philosophical view, which must of necessity warp 
 to some degree the mental and moral estimates of the sys- 
 tems he studies. How far the charge is just in any aspect 
 cannot be determined. In the opinion of the present writer, 
 it is not just to any harmful degree. The investigations 
 were not prompted, in the first instance, by the desire to 
 establish an opinion, but by an old interest in that class 
 of learning. The theory was a result of the investigations ; 
 the reason, perhaps, why they were pursued as far as they 
 were ; an inspiration towards the making of these books ; 
 one explanation of the singular glow of the style that ani- 
 mates the pages. The theory was a cord on which the 
 facts were strung like pearls, a connecting link between 
 the thoughts ; but it never dominated the facts themselves, 
 or decided on the method of their selection, or put a rule 
 on their interpretation. Occasionally the discovery of some 
 point of view may have made him unduly enthusiastic, but 
 the impression is sure to be corrected some pages further 
 along, and a discerning reader can almost always make 
 allowance for the incidental exaggeration. 
 
 Mr. Johnson's theory, — as it may as well be confessed 
 that he had one, — at any rate was broad, large, elastic 
 in its character. It was not sectarian, even in the widest 
 sense of the term. There was no partisanship in it. It 
 had the breadth of pure spirituality. The spirit of it was 
 generous, not as being apologetic, but as being lofty and 
 deep. The expositions are positive, and they are noble ; 
 they do not bind, but unbind ; they emancipate texts, 
 cause obscure passages to leap into light, win forth the 
 hidden wisdom of sentences. They do not stumble or 
 grope, they use wings and fly. There is a surprising 
 
INTRODUCTION. XIU 
 
 exhilaration in them ; and although the reader may now 
 and then demur at the rendering of a phrase, he can never 
 accuse the author of distorting evidence, or of leaving 
 statements out of sight. 
 
 Moreover, the charge of having a theory must rest on 
 Ewald, Baur, Renan, the author of "Ten Great Religions;" 
 in short on every writer who rises above the level of the 
 commentator, exegetist, or word-monger. The historian 
 always has a theory. Gibbon had one; Macaulay had 
 one; Froude has one. An absolutely scientific account 
 of anything complex is not to be looked for. Men with 
 minds will use mind ; and the use of mind cannot be had 
 without some sort of tendency ; and where there is tend- 
 ency there is bias. If the theory is comprehensive enough 
 to include all the facts, it answers every sane purpose ; and 
 if it is expansive enough to take in the foremost facts, it 
 cannot soon be superseded. Mr. Johnson meets both 
 conditions. He is both deep and high. To venture any 
 estimate of his judgment of systems would be out of place 
 here. The volumes are before the public : the critics will 
 express their opinion of the contents as they may deem 
 wise. But it may be safely said that not one of them will 
 get beyond him, or will throw a dart further than he has 
 launched his keen arrow. No living writer has reached 
 the length of his conception, very few come near it. Even 
 advanced thinkers are behind him. " It has cost me labor 
 enough, that is certain," he writes to a friend ; " yet it is 
 a labor of real love, combined with an intense sense of a 
 great demand from the side of spiritual culture and higher 
 relatione of sentiment and imagination, in the present con- 
 dition of the races calling themselves ' Christian.' I hope 
 I have done something to stimulate these forces, and help 
 toward the grand interpretations of natural religion that 
 are yet to come." 
 
XIV- INTRODUCTION. 
 
 This volume, like the others, is saturated through and 
 through with the religious spirit. It was written in the 
 service of religion ; not of religion as commonly appre- 
 hended, but as the best dream of the soul of Humanity 
 of its possible attainment. It is all aglow with faith in 
 God and with hope for man. His biographer tells us 
 that Mr. Johnson's oration on the Class Day of 1842 "was 
 poetic even to rhapsody ; " the same language might be 
 applied to these chapters. The writer deserves, as well 
 as Spinoza, to be called a " god-intoxicated man." When 
 he speaks of Law, Order, Harmony, Beauty, he rises to 
 ecstasy. The thought enchants him ; his sentences burn. 
 This, in fact, constitutes the chief fault that is to be found 
 in the book. Some will think the enthusiasm of faith 
 excessive. They will quarrel a little perhaps over what 
 seems to them an undue extravagance of eulogium in this 
 place, and over an undue depreciation in that; over an 
 unwarranted admiration of certain symbols, and an equally 
 unwarranted criticism of others. But a fault of this kind 
 is as noble as it is uncommon. And when the effect of it 
 is to inspire one with reverence for high sentiments, it is 
 easily pardoned. An error that enlarges the mind is very 
 different from an error that enslaves it, — even granting that 
 an error exists, of which we cannot be sure in this instance. 
 Professor Eitel is of opinion that Mr. Johnson's estimate 
 of Christianity was experimental and practical, which gave 
 him a knowledge of its deficiencies ; while his estimate of 
 other religions, being literary, was favorable to their ideal 
 side. Mr. Johnson's acquaintance with Eastern faiths was 
 acquired certainly from books, but his opinion of Chris- 
 tianity was rather critical than experimental. At least his 
 appreciation of its character and genius was derived quite 
 as much from study as from observation. 
 
 Mr. Johnson was a teacher of the gospel of evolution. 
 
INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 I call it a gospel ; for, as he received it, it was so. With 
 materialism he had no sympathy. Such a doctrine was 
 his abhorrence, the mark of his scorn and sarcasm. He 
 says : — 
 
 " We who insist that there is no ' supernatural ' in the nature of 
 things, that miracle is an absurdity on its face, are called supernatural- 
 ists by men who can digest, without a sign of wonder, such irrational 
 or preternatural notions as those of a world of phenomena without 
 substance, of things seen and touched without a faculty beyond under- 
 standing to bridge the way from ideal to real, of a moral philosophy 
 based solely on calculations or on observed causes and effects, and on 
 developing the whole conception of duty out of a synthesis of conse- 
 quences. . . . This contempt of reason as above understanding, of 
 substance as against phenomena, this denial of direct or intuitive per- 
 ception of reahties even the most universal, is certainly the high road 
 to materialism." 
 
 It will be seen that Mr. Johnson was a transcendentalist, 
 and that he must have been able to reconcile transcenden- 
 talism with evolution, — two systems which are generally 
 supposed to point in exactly opposite directions. He 
 speaks in one of his letters of " the over-haste of science, 
 physical and mechanical, to annihilate those sacred spaces 
 and periods to which the personal virtues are more indebted 
 than the times believe, for disciplines of faith, patience, and 
 trust." To another friend he writes, in January of 1882: 
 " You know I find no inconsistency between evolution and 
 the original fundamental necessities of all thought, on which 
 the transcendental philosophy is founded. . . . What do 
 men mean to do with the foimdatioiis that all freedom 
 must stand upon, — personality, progress, transcendental 
 perception and law? These are all forgotten in petty 
 'crystallizations,' or else mentioned only to be abused." 
 
 The religion of Nature meant much more to him than 
 it does to other men. " There is a spiritual ' Religion of 
 
XVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Nature ' as well as an unspiritual. . . . There is a vital 
 gladness fed by the healthful perception of the glory and 
 beauty of God's works, and of those inner motions that 
 shape all ways to good." The glory and beauty of these 
 works he was never tired of exploring and interpreting. 
 He delighted to think that mind itself, divinely as he esti- 
 mated its endowment, " is evolved, not out of mere inor- 
 ganic matter, but from the universe as a whole. This 
 whole, however, is infinite, and involves inscrutable Sub- 
 stance, which, as recognizable only by mind, is therefore 
 of one nature therewith. The lowest physical beginnings 
 are thus, in virtue of the cosmic force by which they exist, 
 actual mentalities or mental germs." This conception is 
 at the foundation of these chapters on the ancient Iranian 
 faith. The design of the volume, in so far as it has a de- 
 sign apart from the endeavor to represent things as they 
 actually were, is to celebrate the dignity and scope of this 
 idea, to illustrate the advent of living mind into the uni- 
 verse, to set forth the potentialities of the cosmos, so far as 
 this can be done on the field of history. 
 
 Mr. Johnson's conception of Deity' was peculiar, if not 
 unique. He was not an agnostic, although he did not pre- 
 sume to dogmatize about the divine nature. He did not 
 remand the thought of God to the region of the " unknow- 
 able," and then devote himself to the task of investigating 
 the appearances of the world. On the contrary, he began 
 with Supreme Mind, and saw evidences of its working in all 
 visible manifestations. He was rather pantheistic, decidedly 
 more pantheistic than theistic ; but his pantheism had a hu- 
 man cast that brought it close to men's sympathies. The 
 adherence to pantheism is frankly avowed. In a passage 
 quoted from Edgar Quinet, pantheism is heartily accepted 
 as the hope of the intellectual world ; as being both vital 
 and progressive, at once emancipating the human mind 
 
INTRODUCTION. XVU 
 
 from mental prejudice, and opening before it a boundless 
 prospect of advance. But when charged with identifying 
 God with man because he could not separate the two as 
 essentially distinct existences, he pronounced the interpre- 
 tation " preposterous," and maintained that as polarities 
 within the divine life, man being the finite and God the 
 infinite term, there was eternal, though not essential, dis- 
 tinction between them. He continues : — 
 
 <' God going out of man ends man, ends God also. For what 
 would infinite love be, so drained of its natural object ? Infinite sel- 
 fishness is not God. What is left for the bridge to start from, and 
 what should it lead over to ? But what if God be here already, in the 
 nature itself that hopes, remembers, loves ; that even grows by the 
 inevitable lessons of folly, weakness, vices, crimes ? By what mys- 
 terious, unfathomable energy do we live and move ? The ever-flowing 
 tides that sweep through human life, calm or terrible as character shall 
 make them, the mysteries of good or evil, — what but these are the 
 deeps man watches and explores, till he finds within them that trans- 
 cendent purpose and eternal love which he inwardly means by the 
 word God ? " 
 
 And again : — 
 
 "The love we feel, the truth we pursue, the honor we cherish, the 
 moral beauty we revere, blend in with the eternity of the principles 
 they flow from ; and then, glad as in the baptism of a harvest morning, 
 expanding towards human need and the universal life of man, our souls 
 walk free^ breathing immortal air. That is God, — not an object, but 
 an experience. Words are but symbols ; they do not define. We 
 say ' Him.' ' It ' were as well, if thereby we mean life, wisdom, love. 
 All words are but approximations ; the fact, the experience, remains 
 the same. . . . The transcendental law becomes impulse and aspira- 
 tion. Stirred by its ceaseless presence, men listen to the native affir- 
 mations of Mind : I am knowledge, and the medium of knowledge ;^ I 
 am inspiration as well as tradition ; the instant fire as well as the in- 
 herited fuel of thought ; primal as well as resultant ; infinite as well as 
 finite." h 
 
xvill INTRODUCTION. 
 
 This language makes Mr. Johnson's meaning clear to 
 discerning minds. Deity, in his view, is another name for 
 Substance, Unity, Law, Cause. The ordinary intelligence 
 may not take in the conception, but with him it was vital, 
 and meant a good deal more than the current theism im- 
 plies. The idea exalted God as well as man ; for it stripped 
 away those accessories of personality, — or as some will 
 say, of individuality, — which render so difficult of ideal 
 comprehension the thought of the Absolute Being. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to suppose that this faith 
 chilled in the smallest degree his human sympathies. On 
 the contrary, it quickened them all, making them intense 
 as well as spiritual. His zeal, patience, breadth, fortitude, 
 hopefulness were in large measure due to it. The fol- 
 lowing extracts from letters to friends in bereavement 
 shoAv how warm it kept his heart: — 
 
 " I wish I could tell you how firmly I believe that feelings like 
 these, so often treated as illusion, are true, are of God's own tender 
 giving; that in them is the very heart of his teaching through the 
 mystery that we call death. Our affections are forbidden by their 
 Maker to doubt their own immortality. What protest they make 
 against the destruction of what is still intensest reality to them, 
 when all that the senses could hold by is gone forever ! " 
 
 " This loving care that folds in our little hves, how near it comes 
 when we need it most ! I feel as if it held you now in a tenderness 
 such as none of us can know, and none know how to ask for ! ' The 
 night will be light about you,' calling you to what trust-hke sleep, 
 bringing out holy eternal stars ! . . . This life that has been with you 
 so long, close within your own, must still be yours. . . • Soon may the 
 infinite motherly love make the heavens open where they are most 
 darkened now, and the angels descend on your saddened home ! " 
 
 " I know how much your sister has been to you. . . . And now it 
 will all be spiritualized and made part of your eternal life. And you 
 will know how to reap its still, ripe harvests, and to make them cheer 
 and refresh a world that needs nothing so much as spiritual faith." 
 
 " I learn that the gentle sufferer who has so long been made happy 
 
INTRODUCTION. XIX 
 
 by your devoted care has been called into those interior spheres where 
 indeed the calmness and sweetness of her spirit have already seemed 
 to you to be dwelling as in its constant home. Out of your mortal 
 sight, but still in the arms of your unchangeable trust and love. 
 There, too, her home." 
 
 And such as these were his meditations : — 
 
 " Through all the mysteries of our earthly lot, we would ever feel 
 ourselves embosomed in the Infinite Strength and Peace, that with 
 fatherly wisdom and motherly tenderness upholds and guides us, like 
 stars in the sky, through our changes of night and day, of sunshine 
 and storm." 
 
 " We would strive ever to commit ourselves to the serene and 
 perfect laws that guide our human destiny, assured that what our 
 nature appoints must be better for us than aught else we can desire 
 or dream." 
 
 " Whether we walk in the morning light or in the night shadows, — 
 over, around, and beneath us are spread these Everlasting Arms. . . . 
 How real becomes the unseen world, no longer unfamiliar, but warm 
 with the treasures and light of home ! How we look through the half- 
 opened gates into its glory and its peace, where the innocence and 
 beauty of childhood must dwell in the life of which they are the image ; 
 and the ties that have been broken must be preserved in the love that 
 made them ours ; and the powers we would have trained here must 
 be unfolded in the same care that inspired our striving, and will not let 
 it be in vain ! " 
 
 Now one can understand how this worshipper of the 
 universe could write the hymn beginning, — 
 
 " Father, in thy mysterious presence kneeling, 
 Fain would our souls feel all thy kindling love." 
 
 There was no distance between belief and feehng, no oppo- 
 sition of heart and head. This volume has herein a deeply 
 spiritual purpose. 
 
 M. Renan, — the sceptic, — in his " Souvenirs," says : 
 " II se trouve que les plus beaux reves transportes dans le 
 
XX INTRODUCTION. 
 
 domaine des faits, avaient ete funestes, et que les choses 
 humaines ne commencerent a mieux aller que quand les 
 ideologues cesserent de s'en occuper. Je m'habituais des 
 lors a suivre une regie singuliere, c'est de prendre pour 
 mes jugements pratiques le contre-pieds exact de mes 
 jugements theoriques, de ne regarder comme possible que 
 ce que contredisait mes aspirations." A singular rule in- 
 deed ! Proper for a man without convictions. Samuel 
 Johnson pursued exactly the opposite method. Nothing, 
 in his judgment, was so practical as what was most ideal. 
 He believed in his finest dream, and tried to enact it; 
 being persuaded that the shortcomings of conduct were 
 due to the absence of loftiness in the idea. The true fact 
 was aspiration. All men, as he thought, responded to 
 what was highest; and it was only because the highest 
 was not presented that they were cruel, mean, and base in 
 their lives. It was the aim of his existence to lift them up 
 by revealing the divinity that was in them ; and this he felt 
 he could do only by proclaiming the best he saw; and this 
 he did always, the more persistently the older he grew. 
 
 Of the influence of this faith on his personal character, I 
 cannot trust myself to speak. Here is the language of his 
 intimate friend Samuel Longfellow, who has written his 
 memoir: — 
 
 "With us abides as a memory and an aspiration the genuine nobility 
 of soul. With us remains, a sacred and secure possession, the pro- 
 found and elevated thought ; the absolute faith in God ; the clear, 
 spiritual sight of things divine, ideal, invisible, as the realities ; the 
 keen moral judgment of men and events, untinged with bitterness ; 
 the reverent sensibility to all truly sacred things, equalled only by 
 the prompt rejection of all that only pretended to be sacred ; the abso- 
 lute sincerity and sturdy independence in thought, speech, and methods 
 of action, which, while respecting the freedom of others, may not always 
 have been able to do justice to methods different from his own ; the 
 devotion to liberty in all its forms ; the unwearied search for truth, and 
 
INTRODUCTION. Xxi 
 
 the steady-working industry under the burden of bodily infirmity, the 
 sensitive love of beauty in Nature and in art ; the kindly sympathies 
 and warm attachments ; the too modest estimate of himself and the 
 cordial recognition of the good work and worth of others ; the bright 
 mirth that lightened out of his habitual seriousness, — all these 
 things abide with us, now that the voice is stilled and the hand 
 lifeless." 
 
 As much as this all his friends will testify. One can only 
 wish that the praise had been justified to those who were 
 not his friends, by a few personal examples such as Mr. 
 Longfellow could have adduced, had his sense of delicacy 
 permitted. The story of Charles Lamb's heroism would 
 be paralleled by Samuel Johnson's, if all were known. Of 
 course, some of these qualities, — the basis of them all 
 perhaps, — were due to constitutional bias and tempera- 
 ment ; but the superstructure was erected by his faith. Of 
 this there can be no question, as they who knew the man 
 will bear witness. These things are said here in order that 
 the intention and true bearing of these books may not be 
 misapprehended. The bearing of the faith on character 
 was in this instance very fine. 
 
 The service rendered by such a man in this age of 
 purely external literary activity is immense. Had he been 
 a disciple of the current Christian philosophy, the moral 
 conclusions from his theory might have been taken for 
 granted ; but as a teacher of the opposite school, it is 
 important that the ethical results of his doctrine should 
 be exhibited. His interpretation of the cosmic idea is so 
 lofty, stimulating, inspiring; so full of encouragement to 
 every high spiritual feeling; so elevating and kindling, — 
 that one is glad to find him on that side. He lifts the 
 whole exposition into a sphere of ideal faith. Although 
 not technically he is really a believer, and an enthusiastic 
 one. The literal transcendentalist who holds that certain 
 
xxii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 primal truths are planted, fully fashioned, in the nature of 
 man, are corrected by this thinker, who declares : — 
 
 "Of course, the transcendentalist cannot mean that at all times 
 and by all persons the truths now specified are seen in the same ob- 
 jective form, nor even that they are always consciously recognized in 
 any form. He means that, being involved in the movement of intelli- 
 gence, they indicate realities, whether well or ill conceived, and are 
 apprehended in proportion as man becomes aware of his own mental 
 processes." 
 
 " It is not easy to see how we can have intuitive certainty of the 
 continuance of our present form of consciousness in a future life ; still 
 less of what awaits it in a future life. But it is certain that knowledge 
 involves not only a sense of union with that which we know, but a real 
 participation of the knowing faculty therein." 
 
 " By intuition of God we do not mean a theological dogma or a 
 devout sentiment; we do not mean belief in '■a God,' Christian, or 
 other, — but that presumption of the infinite as involved in our per- 
 ception of the finite ; of the whole as implied by the part ; of sub- 
 stance behind all phenomena; and of thought as of one nature with 
 its object, which the laws of mind require, and which can be detected 
 in conscious or unconscious forms, through all epochs and stages 
 of religious belief." 
 
 In the same essay on "Transcendentalism," Mr. Johnson, 
 discussing the intuition of moral law, says : — 
 
 " How explain as a ' greatest happiness principle,' or an inherited 
 product of observed consequences, that sovereign and eternal law of 
 mind whose imperial edict lifts all calculations and measures into 
 functions of an infinite meaning ? And how vain to accredit or ascribe 
 to revelation, institution, or redemption this necessary allegiance to 
 the law of our own being, which is liberty and loyalty in one ! 
 
 " The crude evolutionist who believes in the production of the 
 highest by inherent force of the lowest, who thinks of the universe 
 as fashioned from below upward, has a formidable opponent in the 
 man who is persuaded that the world is fashioned from above down- 
 ward ; that all facts point heavenward; that what we can know is but 
 the process of creative mind." 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxiii 
 
 The ordinary rationalist who seems to be of opinion that 
 criticism will eventually dethrone religion, is confronted by 
 a scholar who is fairly abreast of the foremost students in 
 this department, who reads all the books and hails literary 
 discoveries with delight, yet who regards the work of criti- 
 cism as provisional, as removing rubbish in order to reveal 
 the walls of the " city that has foundations ; " \yho pulls 
 away incumbrances that the " house not made with hands " 
 may be visible. The present volume abounds in conclu- 
 sions which may startle casual readers, but which have no 
 other intention than to bring the ultimate principles to 
 light. They are passages, not chambers ; avenues to the 
 land of promise, that better country which is seen from 
 afar. 
 
 The real value of books like these consists in their idea 
 as well as in their knowledge. They are not content to 
 vindicate ancient religions from aspersion, — that has been 
 done already; it has even become the fashion to do it, 
 among Orthodox people, too (witness the new volume 
 called " The Faiths of the World ") ; nor do they admit the 
 excellence of ancient religions in order that they may show 
 how much more excellent Christianity is as the culmination 
 of all antecedent faiths. The argument of Mr. Johnson is 
 that the old religions are steps in the manifestation of mind, 
 illustrations of the development of consciousness in man. 
 The present volume, the masterpiece of the series, exhibits 
 the evolution of the moral sentiment. The extensive affili- 
 ations of the Persian religion, its influence through Mani- 
 cheism and Gnosticism on Christianity, its speculative 
 ideas and social institutions, make it peculiarly interesting. 
 No merely external study of dogmas and symbols, no criti- 
 cal knowledge of texts, is adequate to an appreciation of 
 this. No partisanship, however generous, can do justice to 
 it. The finest genius alone, fortified by competent learn- 
 
XXIV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ing, can feel its full significance. In this aspect, Mr. John- 
 son's account of Oriental Religions is unique in design and 
 execution. That it has attracted no more attention is pos- 
 sibly owing to the circumstance of its entire originality. 
 Neither the general public nor scholars are awake to the 
 worth of ideas much beyond the line of accepted thinking. 
 Mr. Johnson's absolute frankness, perhaps, repels more 
 than it attracts ; but the time may come when merit like 
 his will be honored as it should be. Should that period 
 arrive, these three volumes will be welcomed as not only 
 among the best expositions of Oriental systems, but as 
 the best and the first attempt at formulating the idea of 
 intellectual and moral evolution, by far transcending in 
 power any work now submitted to the thinking world. 
 
 O. B. F. 
 Boston, April i, 1884. 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 PERSIA. 
 
 I ADVENT OF THE RELIGION OF PERSONAL 
 WILL. -ITS ELEMENTS. 
 
 I. SYMBOLISM ^ ^^ 
 
 An epoch when we become conscious of ourselves as individuals 5- 
 One worships at this stage a personal Will, 6. A higher stage 
 beyond this, in which an ideal in conformity with the eternalorder 
 of the universe is worshipped, 6. The law of history found m the 
 typical qualities of Hindu, Chinese, and Semite, 6. Iranian vener- 
 eration for personal forces; the typical religion of Iran; elements 
 of the Zarathustrian faith; the most significant the tntenser play of 
 symbolic expression, y Personality the basis of symoohc represen- 
 tation 8 We think in symbols ; language is symbohc ; art, science, 
 politics, trade are thought, dream, purpose symbohzed, 9- Our 
 nature the ground for conceiving of the world without us, lo. 
 Nature represents to man that which he is, ii. Man finds images 
 of God in Nature because of his own relations with the infinite, ii. 
 An idol is a symbol, 12. Jahveh and the " Father "of Jesus imper- 
 fect symbols of the inscrutable substance, 13. Religious symbols 
 our human ideals taking external relations to us, 14. We as_ truly 
 '' idolaters " as the heathen, 15. The Moral Order of the universe 
 and Law symbols of the moral and spiritual in the soul 15. Sym- 
 bols the expression of harmonies between the soul and the outward 
 world 16. The Tree a symbol in all mythologies, 16. Christian 
 symbolism in Catholic Mariolatry and Protestant BibHolatry, 17. 
 The difference between ancient and modern symbolism, ib. ihe 
 higher meanings of the cosmos in higher ideals in ourselves, 19. 
 FiRE-SYMBOL, 20-34. Pyrolatry common to all rehg.ons 20, 21 
 Solar mythology a stage beyond primitive fire-worship, 22. Ihe 
 
XXVI TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 moon and star cult older than that of the sun, 23. The sense of 
 liberty explains the difference of fire-symbolism among eastern and 
 western Iranians, 24. The heroic legends of Yima. Thraetona, and 
 Keregagpa, transformations of Aryan symbols of the solar fire, 25, 26. 
 The gift of personifying abstract qualities displayed in the Avesta; 
 the Amesha-Cpeiitas abstractions turned into gods, 27. Down to 
 the present day the fire-altar of the Parsis the hearth of their faith, 
 27. Other symbols had little value, 28, 29. Iran the true fire- 
 temple of Nature, 30. The Persian the iconoclast of religious 
 symbols, 31. The individual the living flame of Ahura, 32. The 
 flame-symbol meant a spiritual power warring against evil, 33, 34. 
 
 II. THE MORAL SENSE 37-50 
 
 The beginning of personality the advent of Will as a personal power; 
 humanity advances by creating symbols of its own ideal experience; 
 fire the ideal bond of man with the universe, 37. ' This epoch the 
 true birth of the Moral Sense also, 37. The war of Ormuzd and 
 Ahriman a war of essential principles, 38. Differences between 
 the Indian and Iranian regarded as of a very radical nature ; but the 
 theory unsatisfactory, 39, 40. Avestan Dualism of light and dark- 
 ness of the Vedas also, 41. But the dark power not emphasized in 
 the Vedas as in the Avesta, 42. The Dualism of the Aryans ger- 
 minant; of the Iranians positive principles warring for possession 
 of the universe, 43. The sense of this strife the result of external 
 conditions, 44. In India the will bent before gods; in Iran bloomed 
 into heroes, 45. The plateau of Iran suggestive of the war of ele- 
 ments, 46 ; a fit arena for the hates of Ormuzd and Ahriman, 47 ; 
 a school for the imagination and conscience, 48. Good and evil 
 creations, Vendidad, i. 49. Such abstraction and personification not 
 of an early stage of culture, 50. 
 
 II. DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 I. AVESTAN DUALISM 53-105 
 
 In the faith of Zoroaster, the old fire-cultus a twofold personality, — 
 Ahuramazda and Angro-mainyus, 53. These two spirits or prin- 
 ciples "primeval twins," 54. Powers of good aid Ahura; the hosts 
 of falsehood and destruction war in the elements against them, 55. 
 Unbelievers children of Ahriman ; Zoroastrians of Ahura's crea- 
 tion ; also there was a sense of moral reprobation or approval, 56. 
 From the oldest Gathas to the latest Yashts a thousand years of 
 growth, 'j,']. The qualities at first blended in Ahura became per- 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. XXVii 
 
 sons,— Vohu-man6,Asha-vahista, Khshathra-vairya, Armaiti, Haur- 
 vatat, and Ameretat ; against these are drawn up Ahriman and his 
 six spirits of evil, 58. To these personal antagonisms correspond 
 physical ones, 59. Animals pure or impure, by rigid rule, 60, 61. 
 The paradise of the Avesta the transfiguration of labor, 62. A reli- 
 gion that could make heroes but never a monk, 63. Profoundest of 
 antagonisms that of life and death ; life the fire worshipped ; death 
 put far away ; no contact with its decay ; the chief weapon of Ahri- 
 man, 64; but overswept of life, by a divine necessity, 65. The 
 parallel with Christian dualism in the creation of an evil humanity 
 by Ahriman, 66. Immortality not involved in transmigration ; or in 
 absorption in Ahura, 66. Man's worth divides the universe, and 
 draws all powers to the one side or the other ; Satan an invisible 
 presence ; resisted and overcome by (i) the spirit of Ahura ; (2) the 
 word or law of Ahura ; and (3) work, 67-69. The whole of this 
 spiritual armor summed up in the formula, — "Tightness of thought, 
 word, and deed," 70. The Avesta's theory of evil involved in free- 
 dom of choice, 71 ; the earliest affirmation of human liberty as the 
 substance of a religion, — the first genuine escape from Fate, 72. 
 Does the Avesta affirm two equal forces ? 73. Ormuzd and Ahri- 
 man spring from Zrvan-akarana, 74. The Author does not find pure 
 Dualism ; still less one God in the Avesta, 75. Ahura representative 
 of Varuna, 75 ; evil from Varuna, not the sign of moral evil in the 
 god, but of righteousness, 76. Evil everywhere inferior and second- 
 ary, jy, 78. Ahriman regarded as a mere purpose of destruction ; 
 only one Supreme God, 79, 80. Trust in Ahuramazda ; fear of 
 Ahriman, 81. Fire shall burn away the dross of evil ; hell shall 
 disappear, 82. Physical resurrection and judgment at the end of 
 the world, 83. Ultimate destruction or conversion of powers of evil, 
 84. Both solutions in the modern Parsi church, 85. Old Accadian 
 writings contain no working out of problem of evil, S6. Assyrio- 
 Babylonian, Hebrew, and Christian eschatology a development of 
 Zoroastrian beliefs, 87. The grand thing implied in the Avesta the 
 victory of good over evil, proclaimed in the conscience, 88. The 
 theory of penal world-destruction held by Hebrews and transmitted 
 to Christianity, 89, 90. Zoroastrianism recognizes the strength of 
 evil, the tragedy of sin and penalty, the martyrdom, of heroism and 
 love, 91-93. Then deliverance, both material and spiritual, 94-97. 
 Zrvan-Akarana similar to Fate, 98. Hindu Destiny, 99. The 
 march of the heavenly bodies identified with Boundless Time, 100, 
 loi. These principles forms of Heaven or the Sky, whence the 
 Supreme God of Indo-Europeans, 102, 103. Worship of Nature 
 
XXVlll TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 the sane and sacred track of humanity, 103. On this track lies the 
 solution of Dualism, 103-105. 
 
 n. MORALITY OF THE AVESTA 109-118 
 
 A morality which insists on the criminality of killing an otter as on 
 the slaying of a man ; trivial associations prove creatures pure or 
 impure ; the dog a centre of superstitious awe, 108. A confusion 
 of physical and moral spheres ; does not forbid a marked degree 
 of moral earnestness ; the value of outward acts in purity of thought 
 and will, 109, no. Marriage and polygamy, 112. All virtues in 
 spreading the law of purity ; the Iranians a chosen people to re- 
 deem the world, 113. The "pure man" a priest; no offering of 
 blood to Ahura, 114. Caste never established in Iran ; yet an aris- 
 tocratic tone in worship of Will even among early Iranians, 115. 
 The destiny of men and spirits hangs on the majesty of Truth and 
 the self-destruction of Falsehood, 116. 
 
 III. ZARATHUSTRA 121-138 
 
 The obscurest figure in the line of Prophets and Messiahs, 120. His 
 
 name cannot stand for any special individual, 121. Age of Zara- 
 thustra running all the way from 6000 to 600 B.C., 122. Chief per- 
 sonage in Avestan religion, 122. Median Magi doubtless deified 
 Zoroaster, 123. Nativity of the Prophet is another mystery, 124. 
 Zarathustrian idea or faith follows the track of Christ ; in the early 
 parts of the Avesta, Zoroaster hears Ahura as a man, 124. Ahura 
 commits to him the good of the world ; not easy to separate this 
 stage from that of miracle, 125. Later, one of the chiefs over each 
 region, probably as priest ; later still, benedictions pronounced in 
 his name ; future saviours his descendants, 126, 127. Mythology 
 surrounded him with the usual halo of supernatural phenomena, 128. 
 Doctrine of Zarathustra traceable back to the fifth century before 
 Christ, 130. Zarathustra reformed the old Aryan religion, 131. 
 Difference between Vedic and Avestan religions, Vedic worship of 
 natural powers superseded by personal interest, 132. A transition 
 from child-life in Nature to that of conscious will, 133. Iranian and 
 Vedic religions may represent a long period of separation ; the ref- 
 ormation embodied in the Avesta not the work of one man, 136. 
 Earliest Gathas not a full-formed system of faith, 137. Yet contain 
 a consciousness of world-purpose, ethical and spiritual, 138. 
 
 IV. THE AVESTA LITERATURE 143-157 
 
 Twenty-one books or Nosks, treating of all possible subjects, probably 
 
 mythical, 143. What has not been lost, confused and fragmentary, 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. XXIX 
 
 143. Old Avesta had its origin in eastern Iran, 144. Greek authors 
 from the third century b. c. quote Avesta, 145. No other Bible in so 
 unsatisfactory a condition, 146, Anquetil-Duperron's pioneer work 
 in opening Avestan literature to Europe, 147. Bibles of the world 
 deposits of religious history of races, 148. Avesta like the rest, 149. 
 Yagna made up of seventy sections of hymn, praise, and prayer ; 
 Vendidad, twenty-two chapters of conversations between Ahura and 
 Zarathustra ; Vispered highly ritualized invocations and prayers ; 
 ; Yashts twenty-four pieces, each in celebration of some genie ; 
 Khordah- Avesta formulas for occasions and times, 150-152. Liter- 
 ature of Sassanian revival older than ritualistic portions of Avesta, 
 152. Sassanidae restored native religion, 152. It blossomed into 
 translations of Avesta, 153. Physical force swept its name almost 
 out of being, but its soul passed into Mahometanism, Judaism, and 
 Christianity, 154. Pehlevi literature analogous to Old Testament 
 compilation after the exile, 155. Shows little spiritualizing tendency 
 like school of Philo ; yet Neoplatonic elements are discernible in 
 it, 156. 
 
 V. CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS OF THE ACCADIAN 
 
 AND THE ASSYRIAN 161-216 
 
 Physical science involves historical antecedents ; mental evolution in- 
 volves earlier stages and conditions, 161. We are products of past 
 as well as present, 162, 163. Uncomprehended monuments of re- 
 
 ' mote ages closed lips with secrets for the future, 164. At opening 
 of present century Babylon and Nineveh still " heaps ; " yet with 
 hints to thoughtful travellers ; the inscriptions of Persepolis the 
 starting point of discovery, 166. Then Calah rose from the heaps 
 of Nimrud ; then Nineveh and Babylon, reconstructing history ; 
 in half a century Behistun and the rocks of Susa and Van were 
 serving a purpose as important as the Rosetta stone, 167. Ten 
 thousand clay tablets of law, grammar, history, science, mythology, 
 of fifteen hundred years, preserved for twenty centuries more, 168. 
 Original texts confirmatory and contradictory of Biblical records ; 
 geography of Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt confirmed from inscrip- 
 tions, 171. Assyrian chronology in opposition to that of the Bible, 
 172. Futile endeavors of harmonists, 174. Genealogy of Genesis 
 not indorsed, 175. Chaldeans a tribe of Accadians ; authority of 
 Berosus uncertain ; primitive civilization of Mesopotamian basin 
 not Semitic, 176. Cuneiform script met requirements of western 
 Asiatic civilization ; Chinese of equal competency for the east of 
 Asia, 178. The two great systems of writing Turanian achieve- 
 
XXX TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 ments; both wonders in early civilization, 179. Cuneiform writing 
 carried monumental literature of Turanian, Semite, and Aryan, iSo. 
 Accadians invented letters in primitive Mesopotamia, 181. Strusjo-ie 
 of good and evil symbolized by light and darkness, 182. Accadians 
 derived good and evil from one source, — Mul-ge, 183. Evil spirits 
 in the air and desert, and in the mind and body of man as disease, 
 184. Jewish reverence for an ineffable Name from Accadians, 184. 
 Hebrew and Greek mythology built on old Assyrian : a personal 
 mediator in old Chaldean tablets, Silik-mulu-khi, 185. A personal 
 guardian attends every one ; the records of a civilization forty cen- 
 turies old preserved, 187. Records of old Accadian kings ; their 
 literature preserved in libraries ; literary capacity of old Turanians ; 
 oldest epic called Izdubar, 188. Accadian legends show percep- 
 tion of cosmical order, 189. Accadian passion for literature, 190. 
 Accadian observation began astronomical work of Sargon's library, 
 191. Commercial life of Babylon and Nineveh from this older 
 civilization, 192. A long advance on patriarchal institutions, 192. 
 Assyrians transmitted Turanian wisdom, 193. Antiquity borrowed 
 more from valley of the Euphrates than from that of the Nile, 194. 
 Cannes and his Annedoti mythic civilizers, 195. Mouth of the 
 Euphrates the old centre of law and culture, 196. Turanian in- 
 dustry corresponded to Assyrian passion for military success, 197. 
 Tribal exigencies created II and Bel, Asshur and Jahveh, and Ara- 
 bian Allah, 198. Symbols of gods, 199. Energy of the Assyrian 
 art, 200. Assyrian art differs from Egyptian as a flame of fire from 
 a pyramid of stone, 201. Little of domestic architecture or popular 
 amusement has come down to us, 202. Kings and people not mere 
 voluptuaries ; empires perish from destructive external forces, 203. 
 The Semite possessed military prowess ; elements more suited to 
 culture, of Turanian origin, 204. Assyrian kings permitted no rec- 
 ord of their crimes or defeats, 204. Yet not mere scourges of 
 mankind, 205. The Semite's passions the voices of gods, 206. 
 Nebuchadnezzar sings of Merodach as the Psalmist of his Jahveh, 
 207. The king prayed directly to gods, yet had faith in dreams 
 of seers, 208. Spiritual part of man in an underworld or raised 
 to the heaven of the gods, 209. No law of retribution after death ; 
 religious rites at the tomb, but nothing said of the future of the 
 departed, 210. The Assyrian, like the Hebrew, interested in des- 
 tiny on the earth, 211. Accadian poem of the Descent of Ishtar, 
 212. Chaldeo- Assyrian civilization a contrast to the Hindu and the 
 Chinese ; Iranian nerve, Hindu thought, Chinese work, 213. Sub- 
 stance of the cuneiform records not realistic and positive ; at once 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. xxxi 
 
 ideal and actual, 213. The religious form of this mental type the 
 worship of personal Will, 214. Our Assyrio-Chaldean study opens 
 this phase of world-development, the foretype of modern religions, 
 215, 216. 
 
 VI. THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN . . 219-27S 
 Babylon the " key of universal history;" moral instinct not tracked 
 to its human beginning in any one age ; the whole human cosmos 
 implicated in every step of human growth, 219. Inspiration of man 
 his natural relation to the Infinite ; Bibles, borrowers from older 
 experiences ; prophets taught from the heart of humanity, 220. 
 The civilization of which Babylon was the type now added to those 
 of India and China, 220. Its ideal the deified personal Will, 221. 
 Assyrian conquerors the youth of the impulse to enthrone Will ; 
 Babylonian influence upon Jewish civilization, etc., 222. Arabia 
 the ancestral land of Semitism ; Babylon its earliest school, 223. 
 Myths of Semite, Greek, and Phcenician point to an Assyrio-Chal- 
 dean origin, 223-226. Babylonian, Phoenician, and Hebrew cos- 
 mogonies, 226. Hebrew and Chaldean customs like those in 
 Accadian inscriptions, 227. Previous to Assyrian relations, much 
 in Hebrew tradition of Canaanite origin, 228. Jahveh a sun-god, 
 
 228. El, Baal, and Moloch meant merely lord or king ; the worship 
 of Jahveh combined with theirs ; all worshipped on the high-places, 
 
 229. First-born offered to Jahveh, 230. Jahveh or Jahveh-Elohim 
 of the Prophets of slow growth ; elevated above all surrounding 
 deities 700 b. c. ; as the Assyrians put other gods under the feet of 
 Asshur ; a step toward monotheism, 231. The Hebrews half Arab, 
 half Canaanite ; their Law a slow evolution ; early aspirations of the 
 Hebrews after a tribal god the substance of the Mosaic tradition, 
 233. Jahveh the real God ; did not imply positive monotheism or 
 exalted purity, 234. Jahveh of Isaiah grew from a beginning like 
 Asshur of Assyria, 235. The majesty of righteous law came slowly 
 out of spiritual experience, 236. Hebrew prophets under a Divine 
 possession ; an outside Will communicating to chosen instruments ; 
 the Semitic god a divinized king; monotheism reached through a 
 sense of tribal or national unity, 237. Intuition of God does not 
 teach any form of deity ; simply the perception of substance higher 
 than phenomena, 238. The Hebrews drew from the beliefs of 
 Babylon, 240. The Hebrew Sabbath of Accadian origin, 241. The 
 Genesis story of creation in the cuneiform tablets, 242. Derived 
 trom the Chaldees, 243. Phcenician and Hebrew " deep ' a waste 
 abyss : old civilizations began with amphibious deities, 244. I ma- 
 
XXxii TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 gery of the sea, 245-247. Nature full of personal, human mean- 
 ing; Pothos, Eros, Tiamat, Belus, 248. Intuition of order from 
 strife and strength of Will, 249. Older theism of the Avesta influ- 
 enced Hebrew monotheism, 250. Hebrew story of creation poetic ; 
 idea of a creative word common to Hebrew and Persian, 251. 
 Second Hebrew story of creation centres in the formation of man, 
 252. Hebrew story of creation an example of elaborate construc- 
 tion ; Eden legend a generalization of history, 253. Legend of the 
 Temptation and Fall the Semitic conception of the origin of evil, 
 254. Explanation of man's disobedience his arbitrary will ; in the 
 Avesta, the falsehood of the tempter ; illustrations, 255. Nothing 
 answering to the Genesis fall of man in Chaldean inscriptions or 
 traditions, 257. Modern theology has read a dogma into this legend 
 of which it is innocent ; purpose of the legend to bring out of Adam 
 a twofold race, the slaves of labor and the favorites of freedom, 261. 
 Genealogy of nations in the tenth chapter of Genesis ; the ten patri- 
 archs had their foretype in Chaldean tradition, etc., 262. Floods 
 overwhelming disobedient races connected with derivation of all 
 things from a watery chaos, 264. Ark-form of the Deluge-myth, 
 266. Scene of Hebrew flood a remote region ; narrative from a 
 foreign source, 267. Hebrew legend has a conscious purpose ; 
 Chaldean simply an episode in an epic, 26S, 269. Noah's sons the 
 nations known to the Hebrews of the exile, 270. Legend of the 
 Tower of Babel ; a cuneiform tablet speaks of a confusion of coun- 
 sels and of the destruction of a tower by Anu, 271. Universal Re- 
 ligion shrinks from ascribing personal motives to the Infinite Being, 
 274. The result of these Genesis studies briefly stated, 275-278. 
 
 III. POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 I. BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA 281-353 
 
 Persian empire a basis for the civilizations of the West ; cuneiform 
 records of immense number of tribes swept into subjection to a 
 common master, 281. League of Lydia, Media, and Babylonia, 
 610 B.C. Median empire lasted less than a century; function of 
 the Mede to introduce the Persian, 282. Left no literature, no 
 permanent institutions ; signs of an energetic life, 283. Religious 
 motor of modern civilizations worship of personality ; present chap- 
 ter illustrates this law of history ; Babylon revives at touch of 
 Mede, 284. Another master to come, with greater genius for sway, 
 385. The Hebrew prophets decry Babylon, 286. Yet Jeremiah 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. XXXlii 
 
 has nothing but honor for the Chaldean city, 287. Her hospitahty, 
 religious and intellectual, 28S. Not the persecutor of nations and 
 faiths, 289. Hebrew exiles protected in life and property ; repre- 
 sented at court, 290. Returning exiles under Ezra's Law a new 
 people, 291. Sorrows of the exile intensified religious nationality; 
 a certain democratic quality, germs of Maccabean heroes, 292. 
 Rude Hebrews learned at Babylon the arts, traditions, and literature 
 of an ancient and great civilization, 294. There in Parsi customs 
 began instruction of the people, reshaping of old prophecies and 
 histories, etc., 296, 297. A nation's existence and growth deter- 
 mined by conditions of climate, position, and race, 298. Incred- 
 ible that Babylon became " heaps " because of moral and religious 
 rottenness, 299. Persian civilization a product of Babylonian ele- 
 ments, 301. The spirit of Nineveh and Babylon moved in the arm 
 of Cyrus, 302. Persia brought her distinctive function, 303. Who 
 were the Persians ? 304. Herodotus' picture bears every mark of 
 truth, 305. The Persians of Cyrus the ideal of Greek historians, 
 306. The Persians the typical Iranian race, 310. The Persian 
 mind not the pure brain, not the passive muscle, but the flame- 
 conductor between the two, 311. The Persian perished in his own 
 fires of ambition and enterprise, 312-315. Obeyed the sturdy rules 
 of Zoroaster, 316. The Persian instructed his children to ride, to 
 shoot, and speak the truth, 317, Worship of Ormuzd ; hatred of 
 Ahriman, 318. Persian sculpture falls behind Assyrian ; ideal as- 
 piration overflows all defects. Force of term nerve, as applied to 
 Iranian races, 319. All worshippers of the flame, 320. Pure 
 thought of the Hindu, plodding work of the Chinese, now a third 
 type, which conducts the cerebral into muscular energy, 321. Self- 
 deification of Iranian monarchs a political expression of personal 
 Will. The family household the social unit, expanded into clans, 
 322. Many tribes free nomads, the most agricultural ; four classes, 
 " priests, soldiers, farmers, and artisans," 323. The Persian noble, 
 the king's counsellor, yet ready to die for his king ; manners ; moral 
 self-respect, 325. The Persians strove for the ideal, yet forgot not 
 the practical, 326. Woman subject to the will of man ; in the in- 
 scriptions and sculptures wholly ignored, 327. Persians could marry 
 nearest kin, 328. Chivalrous treatment of women ; in later times 
 priestesses. Arbitrary Will the law of Medes and Persians, 329. 
 The empire pure product of individual Will, 330, 331. Beginning 
 of respect for personality is in aristocratic institutions, 332. Posi- 
 tive sense of Persian freedom ; Greek consciousness oi manifest 
 national destiny ; Persian sense of a great historic function, 333. 
 
XXXIV TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 Xenophon paid the highest tribute to Persian institutions ; Plato 
 scarcely behind him in praises. Coming of a great man opens the 
 gates of imagination ; Cyrus " father of manlcind," 335. Infancy 
 and growth of Cyrus of messianic type, 336, 337. As hero of philo- 
 sophical romance, receives in Xenophon's " Cyropaedia" the finest 
 personal tribute in all antiquity ; ideal marred by limitations of its 
 framer, 33S-344. To the Greek, Cyrus was the child of Destiny; 
 of Providential purpose to the Hebrew, 345. The ideal as depicted 
 by the imagination of the ages, points to actual force in some de- 
 gree correspondent, 348. From Cyrus's day Iran meant no more 
 a vast desert of warring hordes, but the Persia of the Great King ; 
 Rome showed in humanities of later legislation the pressure of 
 Cyrus's heroic hand, 350. The hand which smote down the old 
 gods of Asia, set up the coming God of Europe ; without Cyrus 
 "the Europe of to-day never would have existed," 351. 
 
 II. ALEXANDER THE GREAT 357-390 
 
 Persia hailed him as her deliverer from disintegration and decay ; he 
 awoke the old Iranian loyalty to personal Will, 357-359. Pupil of 
 Aristotle, reader of Homer, etc. Alexander the higher ideal for 
 which Nineveh, Babylon, Mede, and Persian had educated the 
 races of Iran, 360. Not European ; once leaving Macedon for the 
 East, he never returns ; Iranian tradition adopted him into the line 
 of native kings, 361. The legend knows nothing of enormities, 362. 
 Fitness of Alexander to fill old type of ideal personality, 363. Iran 
 fed the imagination with colossal types of heroic Will, 364, 365. 
 Later legends, 366. To Mirkhond the ideal philosopher as well 
 as king, 367. Difficulty of reconciling outbreaks of fury with gen- 
 eral conduct, 370, 371. Tragedy of personal character involved in 
 human progress, 372. In Alexander an age shapes its instru- 
 ment, 372-374. Zoroastrian priesthood put him in hell for burn- 
 ing the Nosks of the Avesta ; ten Persian poets have sung the 
 "Alexander-Saga," 375. Some palliation for his violent acts, 376. 
 Human master pronouncing himself a god, 377. Alexander proved 
 his descent from Jove, 378. No vulgar marauder ; no praise thought 
 extravagant, 381-383. Alexander aimed at progress, 384. Built 
 institutiops that were civilizations ; his name protected the free 
 thought of Aristotle at the Lyceum, 386. Cultus of his divinity in 
 Egypt, 389. Nature, humanity, unity, brotherhood, were syllables 
 shaping on the winds ; later Judaism, Christianity, and Islam find 
 their way prepared, 390. 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. >^XXV 
 
 III THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE • 393-438 
 
 Destiny of Persian empire had Alexander lived, 393- Monarchica 
 God of Europe could have been evolved from Ahuramazda as wdl 
 as from Jah veh. Allah, or Abba Father, 394- Rev.val of Onental mon- 
 archy might have foreclosed the Messianic tragedy, nothmg m 
 I anL deity made world-influence impossible, 395- But Alexander s 
 purpose^^^^ with him ; disappearance of the faith of Iran durmg 
 the rei^^ns of Macedonian and Parthian kings, 396. Macedonian 
 stranlefs had little interest in Avesta, 397- Religion of the Par- 
 h nfacultusof the elements; Magi transformed into revwahsts 
 of Al ura, 398 Collected and restored the old Avesta, 399- Con- 
 ; ien o Mazdeans not suppressed; Parthians tolerant; Edessa 
 a fountain of Christian learning, 400. Parthians by no means un- 
 civihzed; Mazdeism; intolerance expected from a rehgionof 
 SIvin Will, 401. Interference of Parthian k ngs ^vUh Iraman 
 J^htical insti'tutions unimportant, ,02. No Macedoman or Par d. an 
 king a fit centre of hero-worship, 403. Political stabdity rests on 1 e 
 religious nature, 404. Much in Parthians to rouse tl- 1-ro-wo ^J^^P 
 of Iran, 405. In comparison with Roman C^sars, Parthian eno- 
 mities ;eVectable, 406. Extermination of_ Parthians by Ardeshi 
 Babec^an ; old religious organization of empire preserved, 407. l^e 
 der.;, a kind of '' State within the State ; " Ardeshir rose to the 
 placf ^f Cyrus in hero-worship, 408. United the en^P-e, 4^- Old 
 Avestan hate of unbelievers; the Arab came to -bstUute a god 
 and prophet; Vision of Ardii-Vtraf, 4x1. An older Dante 41 • 
 Energy of Ardeshir more than rivalled by Shapur I., 413- Heroic 
 Tdell o'f Mazdeism fulfilled in Sassanian line ; Shai^C.r II., conqueror 
 of Julian and his Roman and Arabian army, 414- . ^^^°f ^,/- ^"5 ' ' 
 equally famous in Roman wars, 41S. A daughter of Khosru the 
 first f^.ale sovereign of Iran. This great ^^tonc structure wen 
 down before the blows of Rome and Islam, 417. ^YP -al forrn « 
 Iranian ideal in Khosru I. (Ar../.V..?.), 418-425. ^^^l'^^^ '\^^^ 
 vices to future ages in collecting the heroic legends of Iran , native 
 Persian literature perished at the Moslem conquest, 4^6. A e ot 
 Khosru brings him into comparison with the Roman emperor Jus- 
 tinian, 4^8. ^Persecutions by Justinian; toolof an mtolerant pne - 
 hood ; attempts to eradicate Pagan and heretical belief 43°. usUn 
 Maur ce, Phocas, Heraclius, pursued the policy of unifying bdie 
 by the eierdse of despotic will, 431- But a new and stronger w 1 
 appeared in Allah of Islam; Justinian pure and his pa-o- umle^ 
 control ; evidences of real humanity, 432. Bearing of Stoicism 
 upon Roman law, 433- Degeneracy of Roman avdization, 434- 
 
XXXvi TOPICAL ANALYSIS, 
 
 Decay of Byzantine empire ; sway of Islam ; a future of intellectual 
 and political greatness, 435. History of Mazdak ; severities in 
 religion consistent v/ith social and political freedom, 437. 
 
 IV. PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 I. MANICH^ISM 441-498 
 
 Mani had attained the largest culture possible in his day ; astronomer, 
 physicist, musician, and artist of eminence, 441. He purposed to 
 construct a universal system out of the ferment of beliefs in his 
 time, 442. Put to death by Varahran, a Sassanian king; but 
 Christian emperors from Constantine to Justinian tried to exter- 
 minate the sect; Mani claimed to be a Christian, a Gnostic, 444. 
 Reason his authority ; personal will that of his opponents, 445. 
 Judaism and Mazdeism intolerable to Christianity; Manichaeism 
 more intolerable, 446. Good and Evil in the Manichasan system, 
 447, 448. The true Christ crucified throughout Nature, 449. 
 Manichaeism a product of Iranian qualities ; Mani stands in need 
 of just appreciation ; Beausobre's researches found him superior to 
 his opponents, both Pagan and Christian, 450. Dualism a univer- 
 sal experience, 451. Manichaeism more truly monotheistic than 
 Mazdeism, 452. The key to Manichaeism in its effort to avoid all 
 intermixture of evil with God, as a pure and incorruptible essence, 
 453. Meaning of the Manich^ean principle of evil, 457. Eternally 
 separate from that of good, 458. The origin of moral evil in igno- 
 rance, 460. The human is shaped from the substance of the Supreme 
 Light by the Mother of Life, 461. The Avestan Mithra the Mani- 
 chaean Christ, 462. Adam's descendants had power to resist the 
 ever-repeated first temptation through the light-element, the spiritual 
 nature, 463. The Manichasan Christ Docetic, 464. Mani did not 
 deny an apparent assumption of the flesh, 465. Truth and good 
 tend through all changes to bring us back to themselves, 466. 
 Manichaeans accepted the penal woes of the last judgment, but 
 denied the resurrection ; paid honors to the sun and moon, 468. 
 Sin in the Manicheean mind a result of man's nature rather than of 
 his will, 469. Every soul forever prompted to free itself from the 
 desires of the flesh, 470. Mani recognized a secular world to be 
 necessary, as well as a religious, 471. The pride of modern thought 
 to have rehabilitated the material form, 472. Dualism not Atheism, 
 474. The charge of immorality against Manichaeans rested upon 
 the assumption that denial of orthodoxy inevitably led to immorality, 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. XXXvii 
 
 475. Vows of ManichjEan elect like the old Avestan formula, — 
 "purity of thought, word, and deed," 476. Manichjean bishop to 
 Augustine, 477. Main charges against Manichaeism Afao/c and Gnos- 
 ticisjii, dflZ. Plato crossed the seas to learn Magic ; Persians called 
 persons most fitted by nature for truth and religious wisdom Magi, 
 479. Christian world persecuted Magic as the work of the Devil ; 
 invisible realm of powers hostile to God, however, just as real to 
 Christian believers, 4S0-482. Simon Magus a gigantic nebulosity 
 of legend, 483. Magic of Gnostics of the nature of science, or 
 rather was incipient science, 486. Supernatural magic of Church 
 aimed at destruction of the natural magic of the scientist, 487. 
 Under Christianity evil either result of God's will, or of the free- 
 will which he has bestowed on man, 490. Paul adheres to old 
 Jewish idea of Jahveh as the creator of evil in man ; Christian 
 doctrine of original sin and its expiation, 491. Man's impotence 
 and God's wrath a monstrous deduction slowly evolved, 492. Epi- 
 curus stated the case fairly, 493. The thinker sees that evil must 
 exist as the condition of progress, 494. To believe in the unreality 
 of evil requires a mystic elevation of faith ; but the belief has foun- 
 dation in the facts of experience, 496. Science changes the old 
 conception of evil by proving antagonism to be a necessity of 
 existence and growth, 497. Inevitable antagonism, pain, and loss 
 must be accepted through an absolute trust in the integrity of 
 the moral universe, 49S. 
 
 II. GNOSTICISM 501-521 
 
 Connection of Manichaeism with Gnostic schools rendered it obnoxious 
 to Christian Church ; Gnosticism traced in ancient philosophy and 
 literature, 501. Gnosis, or ideal knowledge j our word Agnosti- 
 cism proves by implication the immortality of the aspiration it de- 
 clares a fruitless dream, 502. Gnosticism resisted that personal 
 absolutism which is the essence of supernaturalistic faith ; ac- 
 cepted the name of Christian, 503, 504. In Gnosticism, spiritual 
 principles and ethical forces figured as persons, in true Iranian 
 fashion, 505. The Church held this Gnostic epos to be blasphemy, 
 
 506. Heresy of the Gnostic that he put Christ among the ^ons in 
 a chain of being ; Gnostic powers all in the proem of John's Gospel, 
 
 507. The multitude incapable of receiving the higher Gnosis, 508, 
 509. Not a few things laid to the charge of Gnostics highly credit- 
 able to their freedom and sense, 510. The claim of reason to deter- 
 mine religious conviction, 512. Christianity concentrated its hopes 
 on an incarnation of God as the only refuge for man ; Gnosticism 
 
XXXVlll TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 clung to the idea of perfection in God, 513. Docetic Christ of Gnos- 
 tic, and supernatural Christ of Church alike impossible, 514. To the 
 Christian, evil was the work of Satan ; to the Gnostic, the cosmic 
 energy of the principle of darkness, 515. The characteristic feature 
 of Gnosticism, — the endeavor to express the idea of God as an 
 active process, 518. The germ of a thoroughly free religion; at 
 once scientific and intuitive ; no necessity for bridging chasm be- 
 tween Perfect Light and Utter Darkness, 520, 521. 
 
 V. ISLAM. 
 
 I. MAHOMET 525-70S 
 
 Scientific study of religious development reveals continuous progress 
 towards recognition of the universe as Infinite and as One ; move- 
 ment of every race from polytheistic to monotheistic belief ; the 
 monarchical idea transient, 525. Impersonal worship of ideas, 
 principles, and laws the religion yet to come, 526. Every mo- 
 narchical religion logically has resorted to the sword, 527. Opening 
 of seventh century an epoch of disintegration, 528. Demand for 
 assured trust in one supreme Will, 529. No God but God ; Ma- 
 homet claimed a completer legislation than that of Abraham, Moses, 
 or Christ, 530, 531. Islam enforced the logical right of revelation 
 to sway every human sphere, 532. Could not escape resort to the 
 sword, 533, 534. Arabia fit only to give birth to the prophet ; not 
 to establish his law, 535. Rapid growth of Christianity believed 
 to be evidence of supernatural origin ; rapid conquest would prove 
 Mahomet's claim more valid, 536. His expectation to make the 
 world the kingdom of God the push of humanity, 537. His sum- 
 mons nothing unfamiliar to his countrymen, 538. The unity of God 
 embedded in Arabian memory and faith, 539. Mosaism and Chris- 
 tianity familiar to the Arabs, 540. Mahomet's first relations were 
 with Jewish and Christian believers ; did not derive inspiration 
 from the Bible ; knowledge of Old and New Testaments at second 
 or third hand ; knowledge of the past incomprehensible, 541-543. 
 Preceded by a line of native poets who proclaimed Allah as above 
 all gods, 544. Ancient "Rolls"' of Mahomet probably the so-called 
 "Rolls of Moses," 546. Sought only to recall his people to the 
 service of One they already knew ; pretended to no message from 
 an unheard-of Power or Name, 547. His morality that of all good 
 men in his day, 548. Sentences from Koran, 550. Mahomet's suc- 
 cess not due to sensual appeals ; reward and penalty of Paradise, 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. XXxix 
 
 551. Democratic tone of his message, 552. Abolished privilege of 
 sex in religious function. The pen, giver of Bibles to men, 553, 
 Mahomet declared God spoke to all, to prophet and slave alike, 
 554) 555- Hardly a trace of Christian phraseology in Koran ; ideas 
 inherited from many preceding faiths, 556. The final result of a 
 long evolution of the worship of personal Will, 557. In this terrible 
 Will is the same tender care and pity that go with it in the Hebrew 
 and Christian God, 558. The Divine origin of the revelation as- 
 sumed as indubitable, 559. Mahomet refers to the character of his 
 book to prove it could come only from God, 560. No appeal to the 
 supernatural in himself; yet he became a centre for legend, 561. 
 To him the desert spoke without reserve ; the desert the mother of 
 the Semitic temperament, 562. Difference of the desert aspects of 
 day and night the key to Semitic mythology, 564. Symbols of the 
 desert, 565-567. The desert the prophet's cell and throne. Forth 
 from its wastes march Moses, Zoroaster, Jesus, Mahomet, 568. 
 Its influences account for Mahomet ; shaped the race of which 
 he was born, 570. Poetic literature of pre-Islamic Arabia ; Abu 
 Temmam's poems ; frank acceptance of the reahties of destiny, 
 571. Old Arab ideal, 572. Mahomet's quotations doubtful ; Lok- 
 mS,n the natural precursor of the Prophet, 573. Poets of Age of 
 Ignorance ; their songs bursts of self-abandonment, 574. Imriol- 
 Kais, 575. Amru ; verses of Lebid ; the desert fates stern, 577. 
 Mahomet's call to religious unity followed up by the summons to 
 boundless citizenship and mastery, 57S. Declared war against the 
 poets ; yet himself the greatest of Arab poets, 579, 580. Gave his 
 nation's genius moral energy and obedience to a purpose ; Carlyle 
 put this mystery into words ; Mahomet the focus of tendencies, 581. 
 Genius and personal mastership; no explanation of, but the universe 
 of mind, 582. Mahomet alone of religious founders shaped his 
 work to success within his own lifetime, 583. The Koran the foun- 
 tain of faith to millions of men for fifty generations, 584. The 
 norm of books, the veritable Arabic speech of Allah ; a year after 
 his death Zeyd gathers up the fragments, 5S5. Eighteen years 
 afterwards, the same hand compiles a more careful text ; it is not 
 like the Sermon on the Mount ; nor like the Buddhist Sutras ; nor 
 like Plato's conferences ; a prophet's cry, Semitic to the core, 586. 
 Mahomet himself the indubitable maker, 587. Incomprehensible 
 that down into the present century his name has been synonymous 
 with Satan, 588. The first word of justice to him spoken by Sir 
 John Mandeville ; then came scholars with clearest proof of a 
 prophet in the natural order of historic movement, 589. Mahomet 
 
xl TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 had the temperament of genius and a tendency to melancholia, 590. 
 In youth a believer in the popular polytheism, slow to fix his faith 
 on the unity of God ; at last came the outflaming of his ideal, 592. 
 Most who heard him gladly were the poor, ignorant, and despised, 
 many of them slaves ; then came the seventy " Helpers," 594. 
 United hostile tribes in a common faith and purpose, 595. The 
 sword involved in his monarchical creed, not deliberately chosen, 
 596. Political rather than religious authority propagated by the 
 sword, 597. Can mark the period when the necessity of conquest 
 took possession of Mahomet's mind, 598. Confesses his faults ; 
 early death of Jesus fortunate for his example, 599. Polygamy the 
 demand for male offspring in the East ; low as was Mahomet's esti- 
 mate of woman, his regulations improved her condition, 600. In 
 many senses a Turkish woman has more liberty than an English, 
 601. Not to be expected that Mahomet should abolish slavery, 602. 
 Tenderness of Mahomet towards brute creation, 603. Mahomet 
 and the modern world, 604. Islam connects religions of personal 
 Will and worship of Cosmic Order, Unity, and Law, 605. The 
 prophet of Divine Will practically inseparable from God, 606. In- 
 carnations familiar to Asiatic races, 607. In Islam the process began 
 in the idealization of Mahomet ; continued in the worship of Ali ; 
 later in that of the twelve Imams ; Iran the land of hero-worship ; 
 apotheosis of Mahomet began very early, 608, 609. In Arabia, the 
 free spirit of the desert refused this homage, 610. No doubt his real 
 personality had much to do with his swift exaltation, 611. Divinizing 
 began immediately after his death, 612. His common rephes quoted 
 as the words of Allah, 613. The rage of deification naturally acts 
 upon one representative, as in the worship of Jesus as God ; yet in 
 Islam it took a continuous form, 614. Fatimite dynasty in Africa, 
 founded upon the divinity of Ali, 615. Imams supposed to have 
 dropped their human natures, and been absorbed into the essence of 
 Deity, 616. Ali-worship the endless tale of Persian sects, 617, 618. 
 Ali and his Imams do not exhaust Islamic apotheosis, 619-622. 
 Nothing more incongruous with the sublime Allah than adoration of 
 saints, their tombs and miracles, 623. Swarms of adored Sheikhs, 
 etc., 624. All this resisted in every age by rationalistic theists ; 
 Wahhabism the revival of old Arab individuality and natural scep- 
 ticism, 625, 626. Religious monarchism centred in personal claims, 
 627, 628. Division upon predestination and free-will, 629. Motaza- 
 lites represented free thought; Kharijites and others opposed sinless- 
 ness of the Prophet, 630, 631. Absolutism not unaffected by the 
 struggle with liberty, 632. After a hundred and fifty years of strife 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. xli 
 
 orthodoxy condensed into form what the Koranic logic required, 
 633. Ghazzali passed from intellectual scepticism to supernatural- 
 istic faith, 634 ; had some ghmmer of transcendental thought, 635. 
 His precepts creditable to his mind and heart, 636. In Spain, the 
 same logical necessities developed as in the East ; glimpses of uni- 
 versal religion, 637. Motazelite controversies in Persia explained 
 by continuities of religious history, 638. Kalam, after being the 
 inspiration of liberalism, turned into the organ of orthodoxy, 640. 
 An accession to the resources of free thought, — the Aristotelian 
 writings, 641. A revolution for Islam, 642. Organon of Aristotle 
 taught the ages to think, 644. Instinctive rejection of such a foe 
 by supernaturalisra; ethics of Aristotle had even greater fascination, 
 645. Aristotle's demand for mental freedom, 647. Influences of 
 Aristotelianism summed up in Averroes ; expends his entire strength 
 against Ghazzali, 649 ; exerted a profound influence on Persian, 
 Jewish, and Christian thought, 651. Scholars like Alfarabi, Al- 
 kindi, Avicenna, and Averroes not blind worshippers of Aristotle, 
 652. Refused to accept immortality as a postulate, 653. When 
 the orthodoxy of Ashari and Ghazzali triumphed, the freer philo- 
 sophical writings passed over to the Jewish schools, 655. First 
 effect of Arabic revival on Jewish thought, 656. Maimonides mas- 
 ter of Jewish learning and thought, 657. Monotheism imposed 
 bounds upon him, 659, In tenth century "Brothers of Purity" 
 arose, 660. One of the noblest efforts in Universal Religion or 
 Free Science ever made, 661-665. The reaction by Ghazzali and 
 Ashari led to persecution of philosophy in all parts of Islam ; yet 
 orthodoxy could not escape the influence of science, 666. The sway 
 of blind faith produced a mixture of hypocrisy and devotion, 671. 
 These Mussulmans more effective forerunners of positive science 
 than their Christian contemporaries ; after twelfth century Islam's 
 intellectual work seemed to be done, 672. First reason triumph 
 of orthodoxy ; second reason despotic politics of Islam, 673. In- 
 fluence of conquest of Persia on Arab mind, 674. Arabs formed 
 miHtary camps in Irak, 676. Persians the leaders and shapers of 
 Islamic culture ; Arabs learned of these larger brains, music, 
 architecture, sculpture, politics, etc., 679. At the time of the Cru- 
 sades, Turkish and Mongol and Berber dynasties had risen on 
 the Euphrates ; at the touch of the Mongol, the empire of the 
 Arab vanished ; power of Islam as a faith or a name not weakened 
 thereby, 681. Intolerance in its very nature, 682. Outbreaks of 
 cruelty and fanaticism in its name due in part to a religion of au- 
 tocratic Will, 683. Not even Christianity has equalled Islam in 
 
xlii TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 the push of free-thought from within its name ; intellectual scepti- 
 cism and spiritual indifference of the Arab, 685. Other influences 
 favorable to freedom, 686. The external impulse given to it by 
 Zoroastrian traditions, 687. Tendency to intellectual as well as 
 practical dishonesty, 688. The Mongol hordes had the qualities 
 of beasts, 689. Yet not destitute of religion ; the effect of Islam 
 to expand a half-sceptical, half-believing impartiality, 690. The 
 same impartiality in the treatment of woman; of the same nature 
 the democratic freedom in the election of the Khan, 691, 692. 
 Their raids had no purpose but to supplant ancient States ; de- 
 struction of books and of literary men, 692. The influences of Iran 
 transformed them into men, 693. Their dynasties the great days 
 of Iranian poetry and thought; Togrul Beg, Alp Arslan, Hulagia, 
 Ghazan, 694-698. The Iranian population compared with these 
 hardy nomads, 699. Genghis; his son Ogotai ; Timur, "the 
 Lame," 699-703. The empire of the nomad disappears ; the Uz- 
 beg Tartars sweep over the land ; Barber begins the great Mogul 
 empire in eastern Iran ; Ismail sets up a native kingdom in Persia, 
 and the old traditions emerge once more, 704. " Timur's Life and 
 Institutes," 705. A connection between the conquests of the Mon- 
 gols and the progress of civilization ; poetry and the arts revive ; 
 discoveries imported from the East by the Mongol, 707, 708. 
 
 II. THE SHAH-NAMEH; OR, BOOK OF KINGS. 711-782 
 A reproduction of the religious and political traditions of Iran, 711. 
 A true history, though its personages and events are unknown, 
 712. Attempts of ingenious scholars to identify the heroes of 
 Iran with Median and Scythian kings ; its psychological history 
 a tale of heroes, 713. The ethical and heroic meaning a domi- 
 nant consciousness ; these antique personaUties the inspiration and 
 solace of the national heart, 714- The real depositaries of local or 
 tribal traditions the proprietary chiefs, JiS- Among these Din- 
 ishvar compiled the Basitan-N^meh (a.d. 652); Omar consigned 
 the whole mass of national legends to destruction, 716. At the 
 end of the tenth century Mahmud of Ghazni resumes the collect- 
 ing and places the materials in the hands of the king of Oriental 
 poets, Firdusi, 717- His first triumph at a poetic tournament, 
 718. Could not escape envy, 719- Suspicions of his orthodoxy, 
 720. The great task done, Mahmud pays but a fraction of the 
 promised reward ; the outraged poet flings it away, 721- But the 
 wound was mortal, 722. Died in the full sense of his wrongs, 723. 
 An epic in hterature the complete ideal of a nation, 724. The 
 
TOPICAL ANALYSIS. xHii 
 
 master-key o£ every epos, the dominant consciousness of the civ- 
 ilization which produced it, 725. The master-motive of the Shah- 
 Nameh the tragedy of human destiny and the irony therein ; never 
 in it a failure of life's summons to self-sacrifice and moral loy- 
 alty, 727, 728. The heroes of the Shah-Nameh tlioroughly hu- 
 man, 729. Society born with Jemshid, 730. The anti-Jemshid 
 appears in Zohak, the old Vedic cloud-god, 731. Destiny's decrees 
 cannot be stayed, 732. The legend of Selm, Tur, and Iraj, 733. 
 The opening scenes of an epic whose movement embraces all 
 history, 735. The tragedy of life sought in the play of nearest 
 and dearest relations, ^y]^ 738. The line of great Pehlevans of 
 Seistan begins in Sam ; the legend of Sam and Zal, 739. Zal and 
 Rudabe, 740. Parentage of Rustem, the mightiest among the 
 mighty, 741. The tale of Rustem and Sohrab, 742-745. The 
 dealing of a tragic Nemesis again in the story of Gushtasp and 
 Isfendiyar ; the seven adventures of the young hero, 746. Rus- 
 tem and Isfendiyar, 747-749. Personal heroism the chief eman- 
 cipator from patriarchal absolutism, 751. Siavaksh disobeys his 
 father and takes refuge with the king of Turan, 752. Kindly re- 
 ceived ; then treacherously murdered ; at length avenged, 753, 754. 
 The higher law of honor, sacrifice, love, and truth asserts itself 
 against the authority of throne and priesthood, 755. The responsi- 
 bility of kings to the heroic ideal runs through the epos, 757. 
 Afrasiyab, the incarnation of Turanian hostility and guile ; on the 
 other hand Khosru the ideal king, 758. The close of his reign be- 
 trays the hand of Islam, 761. He is taken up to heaven alive; such 
 the reward of ideal royalty, 762. The central figure of the epic em- 
 bodies the merits and faults of the civilization, 763. In every great 
 peril Rustem holds the fate of Iran, 764. This vast responsibility 
 gives his Hfe the highest ethical interest, 765, 766. With Rustem and 
 Zal ends the heroic race of Iran ; the story of Piran the tragedy of 
 a good man in a bad cause, 767. The religion of the Shah-Nameh 
 monotheistic ; inspired by the heroic traditions of Iran ; down to 
 the reign of Gushtasp no impassable religious line between Iran and 
 Turan, 769. Advent of Zerdusht in his reign ; the war with Turan 
 becomes a religious war, 770. The story of Rustem and Isfendiyar 
 echoed in that of Dara and Iskander, 771, 772. Iskander counselled 
 by Aristotle ; his death and obsequies, 773. Ardeshir the restorer 
 of the faith ; the Sassanian kings preachers in a high moral strain, 
 774. Ardeshir proclaims that his " empire is justice ; " his son 
 Shapur ; the right of revolution, 775. Bahram elected king by the 
 chiefs ; an ideal reign the result, 776. Noble precepts suggestive 
 
xliv TOPICAL ANALYSIS. 
 
 of a Persian rather than Mahometan origin; influence of Mazdak 
 upon king Kobad, ^TJ. The ethics of heroism not in the interest 
 of a priesthood; Buzurjmihr, 778-781. Hormazd succeeds his 
 father Nushirvan ; overturned by Bahram ; close of thi^ epos, 782. 
 Editorial note, 783. 
 
PERSIA. 
 
ADVENT OF THE RELIGION OF PERSONAL WILL. 
 ITS ELEMENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 SYMBOLISM. 
 
ADVENT OF THE RELIGION OF PERSONAL WILL 
 
 ITS ELEMENTS^^^^p^^-^^^ 
 
 'uitiv:brst 
 
 SYMBOLISM. ^^/POE"^ 
 
 'T^HERE is an epoch in our experience when we become 
 •*- conscious of ourselves as individuals, distinct from the 
 world of forces, natural and human, into which we were 
 born. Before this beginning of our proper personality, we 
 are more or less passive products, either of contemplation 
 and imagination, or of traditional routine ; in other words, 
 we are either dreamers or plodders, — in the one case, drift- 
 ing waves of abstract mind ; in the other, atoms of a con- 
 crete mass. In neither have we become centres of special 
 force. In neither have we learned that our estimate of the 
 objective world depends upon what we personally know and 
 feel and do, and, substantially, upon what we are. That 
 
 " We receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone doth Nature live," 
 
 is as true of the child as of the man, of the poor creature 
 as of the hero or the saint. But the moral and spiritual 
 possibilities involved in this constant law are realized only 
 through the consciousness of ourselves as distinct from our 
 surroundings, and, as it were, polar to them. This is the 
 condition of progress, — that we know ourselves to be 
 centres of productive force. 
 
 The organ of this conscious personality, the force which 
 it brings into play for purposes of power and growth, is 
 the IVz/l Strictly defined, Will is the concentration of 
 
6 ELEMENTS. 
 
 mind on the selection, from among the infinitude of objec- 
 tive forms, of that which suits the subjective desire, and 
 the transforming of it from a thought to a thing in the 
 shape of that desire, from an ideal to a real or actual 
 image of it, — a transfer from brain to hand. And as one 
 really worships that by which he is most deeply moved, so 
 the ideal, the truly sovereign power for this stage of self- 
 consciousness, is always 2l personal Will. 
 
 Beyond this stage there is a higher, in which the will, 
 recognizing the eternal order of the universe, of which it is 
 but a fragment, finds its ideal in conformity, not with per- 
 sonal ideals, but with this substantial order itself. And 
 this step beyond the worship of personal will is foreshad- 
 owed in all the immature steps of experience, which point 
 beyond themselves to its serene and perfect freedom, — 
 although in individual life it is seldom reached. 
 
 Such is the order of individual growth. But it is not 
 less the law of history, the course of humanity: the ages 
 are its theatre, and the races are its material. In the old- 
 est civilizations, even in their highest forms, we have found 
 noticeable the absence of personal Will, Men are homo- 
 geneous. Classes, castes, tribal distinctions, family units, 
 do not express essential individual differences, but at most 
 only differences between certain masses of similar persons, 
 or relations, and other masses equally unitorm. The typi- 
 cal qualities of some races, such as the Hindu and Chinese, 
 have kept them, as we have seen, on this imperfect stage, 
 even down to the present moment, repressing that self- 
 consciousness of which individual will is the exponent.^ 
 In their Southern expansion, the Indo-European race were 
 subject to this repression, through climatic and institutional 
 forces ; but in their Northern and Western expansion, they 
 entered at once on the epoch of self-conscious individu- 
 ality. The Semites, starting from the other extremity of 
 
 1 See the author's China, p. 946. 
 
SYMBOLISM. 7 
 
 Iran, did the same, though with significant differences. 
 The power of these combined energies to initiate the his- 
 toric progress of the Western civihzations, has been fully- 
 shown in the historical survey already presented.^ The 
 central point of the whole movement is seen to be the 
 evolution and worship o{ personal Will. 
 
 The earlier stages of Iranian development have been 
 marked, not by any extended expression of individuality, 
 but by a common veneration for great personal forces, 
 wherever they appeared, and by a strong tendency in such 
 appreciation to call them forth. This is itself a form of 
 religious idealism. But we are now to enter on what may 
 be called the typical religion of Iran. It may be well to 
 begin with a review of the special elements which in men 
 and nations accompany the advent of that epoch of ex- 
 perience which we have endeavored to describe, that we 
 may see how faithfully these are actually represented in 
 the Zarathustrian faith. 
 
 The most significant of these elements for the history of 
 Religion is an intenser play of symbolic expression. I use 
 the comparative degree, because symbolization is in some 
 form a constant fact of mental life. Swedenborg's doctrine 
 of "correspondences" was an imperfect adumbration of real 
 spiritual dynamics, and rests upon the law that whatever 
 a being is, must appear in what it knows or does ; because 
 self-manifestation is the inherent necessity of substance. 
 " If the invisible things of God are to be understood from 
 the things that are made," it is for the reason now stated. 
 When the spiritual fact exists, the physical is made also, 
 which represents it, just as surely as that one who is build- 
 ing a pile of stones in the morning light is building the 
 shadow of the pile. The fact of " correspondence " is uni- 
 versal, the difficulty is in reading it; and the fault of the 
 class of minds represented by Swedenborg is their over- 
 
 1 See the author's India and China 
 
8 ELEMENTS. 
 
 assumption of final knowledge, and the fixedness of their 
 formulas presented as a science of interpretation, — a fault 
 not confined to any class of believers, but arising from the 
 universal fact of personal limitations in the study of phe- 
 nomena. It is, however, eminently the consequence of all 
 positive religion, after its early or prophetic stage has 
 passed into that of organization. 
 
 The substance of the universe is inscrutable. We know, 
 indeed, that whatever we see must be symbolic of that 
 which it manifests ; yet we have no definite knowledge of 
 the process of manifestation, save what we derive from the 
 productive force of man. Personality is thus the basis of 
 symbolic representation ; and the more distinctly and 
 energetically conscious we are of personalit}', as motive- 
 power, the more freely do we use the elements of experi- 
 ence as signs of somewhat beyond themselves. As the 
 centre of energy, it is personality that transforms our 
 thoughts into things, our being into act, our mind into 
 matter, our abstract into concrete ; and every such process 
 is the construction of a symbol or sign representative of our- 
 selves. Here again we may recur to our threefold historical 
 illustration. With the Hindu, w^ho lacked power to seize 
 and hold the one of these two poles of the process, — that 
 of the concrete, — and the Chinese who failed to grasp the 
 other, or abstract pole, all symbolic constriiction was in the 
 main ill-defined and unconscious. On the other hand, 
 the self-consciousness of the Aryan is concentrated on this 
 very thing, the constructive process itself, by which the one 
 force (internal) is transformed into the other (external). 
 With the Aryan mind, natural symbolism becomes con- 
 scious, clear, significant, progressive, full of human relation 
 and power. It is the natural activity of a mind that in- 
 stinctively sees, not ideas alone, nor things alone, but the 
 idea as producing the thing. Two conditions are requisite 
 for every step in progress : first, to believe firmly that 
 
SYMBOLISM. 
 
 there is an unseen and an unattained ; and next, to believe 
 as firmly that the actual materials of life can be made into 
 its image. 
 
 This typical symbolism, however, simply brings to ideal 
 value and emphasis the necessary processes of mental crea- 
 tion. We cannot think save in symbols. Language itself 
 is a symbolic expression. We can express ourselves only 
 in terms taken from the world of the senses, or in some 
 way involving that world. So far we are all poets. We 
 say " burning thoughts," " bright or dark moods." We 
 speak of the " growth of character," the " branching out 
 of plans," the " withering of hopes." We have all the 
 seasons in our experience. We " revolve " like planets 
 around a centre. We have " ups and downs," " corners 
 and spaces " in our hearts ; " heights and depths " in our 
 reason ; " hard and pliable characters." We unfold our 
 powers, plume ourselves, shut ourselves up, pour ourselves 
 out; have upright or downright, winding or backward, 
 ways. We sigh and groan in spirit; leap and sing in- 
 wardly. Our souls bend in prayer; aspire, or breathe, 
 after God. We have a great many general terms, which 
 suggest no material image, yet are not without recognized 
 meanings for the reflective or contemplative mind. But 
 the moment we make active use of those meanings, clothe 
 them with positive individual form and purpose, turning 
 thought into thing, the process and result must both be 
 expressed by physical images. Symbolism is mediation 
 between inward and outward, person and performance, 
 man and his environment. 
 
 Work is the image man makes of himself on the world in 
 and through nature. Art, science, politics, trade, are just 
 the outward shape of the human will ; incarnation of the 
 spirit; thought, dream, purpose, symbolized. The word, 
 shaped by the organs of articulation in the air, represents 
 the speaker, and somehow impresses the remotest orb with 
 
lO ELEMENTS. 
 
 his likeness. Am not I myself here on this sheet of paper, 
 in my handwriting, every word penned an autograph — nay, 
 photograph, made by the invisible sun of spiritual reflec- 
 tion? Do we not fling ofl" impalpable aromas all the time, 
 so that, as the hound scents his master, the nerves of finer 
 organisms find us out by means of them, even when we 
 have ourselves got a thousand miles away? Do not peo- 
 ple construct our traits and habits and beliefs out of a lock 
 of our hair, or a few strokes of a pencil, down to minutest 
 shades of character, as Cuvier built up a mastodon out of a 
 few bones? Every atom of blood, brain, nerve, that is in 
 us — every stir of limb or feature — represents us. What 
 is Phrenology, when the motion of your little finger betrays 
 every secret of your inward behavior to the wise? 
 
 It is easy to ignore the symbolism of ourselves, in which 
 we have our being, weaving it about us by the unconscious 
 organic motions of character. " Alp and torrent shall 
 inherit our significance of will." Nature is a convenient 
 cooking-stove to one, a private mint to another, an out- 
 flaming of ineffable beauty to a third. 
 
 " To some she is the Goddess great ; 
 To some the milch cow of the field : 
 Their wisdom is to calculate 
 What butter she will yield." 
 
 But if we are poorly conscious of what we do with the 
 world to which we are related as creators of symbols, still 
 less common is it to recognize the law of perception on 
 which all doing and creating must rest. We can have no 
 cognizance whatever of the world without us, except in so 
 far as our nature, its complex of individual and universal 
 relations, affords a ground for conceiving it. In other 
 words, it represents these personal or spiritual relations. 
 Just as it is the participation of our human nature in truth 
 that enables us to recognize truth in others, and its par- 
 
SYMBOLISM. 1 1 
 
 ticipation in love that allows us to delight in their love, so 
 it is with our perceptions of the Cosmos itself. I can 
 behold space as infinite only because of the relations of 
 human thought and feeling as such with infinity; and so 
 the star-sown universe is a symbol of these human capaci- 
 ties, without whose activity within me no telescope could 
 ever have suggested to me such an idea as boundlessness 
 in numbers or space. Nature must either be void and 
 meaningless, or it must represent to man that which he is, 
 or does, or tends to do, by natural forces. The endless 
 roll of waves upon the beach impresses us only as our 
 mood touches it with our own sense of immeasurable task 
 or yearning, of personal destiny or conscious power. We 
 are the diamond refining in the dark ; we the lightning 
 that breaks from tilting clouds. What we see is what the 
 brute sees not: it is ourselves. Man's aspirations burn 
 before him in the stars : his passions grovel and snarl and 
 rend their prey before him in the beasts that perish. He 
 reads the character of another, ever so different from his 
 own, by some subtile opening of his own qualities into a 
 capability for traits which his conscious will or disciplined 
 spirit would probably refuse to entertain. And whether 
 we read the tornado, the pestilence, or the struggle for 
 existence from a pessimistic or optimistic point of view, or 
 as reverent hearers of Nature's incitements to duty and 
 humanity; whether we interpret these destructive powers 
 as curses upon fallen man, or as conditions of his ascension 
 to the best, by natural evolution, — it is still the limit or 
 the liberty in ns that supplies the alphabetic signs, where- 
 with we read. All symbols represent humanity, either its 
 actual or ideal values. 
 
 Ideal as well as actual, — for man finds images of God also 
 in Nature, only because of his own essential personal rela- 
 tions with the ideal or infinite ; and being so related, relig- 
 ious symbolism is natural and necessary mediation between 
 
12 ELEMENTS. 
 
 himself and his highest conception of being. Resting, 
 then, on this universal law of personality, the choice of 
 special symbols with the definite meaning given to the 
 object chosen by the symbolizing faculty is not arbitrary. 
 It is the product of positive relations, as organic as those 
 of language ; and though the individual mind becomes 
 more and more clearly conscious of them, they are never 
 so wholly unrecognized as not to be instinctively pursued. 
 In this way we must explain the general uniformity of 
 meaning ascribed by different ages and races to the same 
 element or phenomenon in Nature. 
 
 In view of this universality in the most important ele- 
 ment of religious construction, the supposed distinction 
 between polytheist and monotheist, Pagan and Christian, 
 Catholic and Protestant, which is conveyed by the use of 
 the term idolater for the former of these classes, appears 
 very superficial. In both classes the method is the same ; 
 the result is a symbol, — its meaning, as well as its choice, 
 being determined by the laws and limits of human experi- 
 ence. Who, then, is an idolater, and what is an idol? We 
 can only arrive at the idea that any people endowed with 
 a degree of social consciousness have ever worshipped 
 " stocks or stones " by abstracting from the object that 
 symbolic significance which was the very ground of its 
 selection and the substance of its meaning. It represented 
 an ideal in the mind of the worshipper, as is evident enough 
 from the fact that it was believed to enshrine and cover 
 immeasurably more than it was, or could be, as stock or 
 stone. It is not the fetichist only who confesses this when 
 he breaks his image in pieces if it does not answer his 
 desire, and finds another. The procedure does not differ 
 essentially from that of the Christian, who venerates an 
 image or picture so long as it represents the vision of his 
 faith, or who takes an historical personage, around whom 
 certain religious symbols have gathered, as the representa- 
 
SYMBOLISM. 13 
 
 tive of God, or as God himself; and then, as his scien- 
 tific, moral, social, spiritual stature enlarges, comes to 
 demand larger symbols of his ideal life. Or, if we give to 
 religion the broadest meaning, as simply the service one 
 pays to his ideal, in whatever form that may stand for his 
 thought, must it not necessarily be the worship of some 
 object which represents symbolically the sum of his best 
 inward desires? Does not money, or fame, or fashion, or 
 culture, serve for the time the same purpose as the " idola- 
 ter's " stock or stone? Religious symbolism does not vary 
 in its method : it varies according to the quality of the 
 personality of which it constructs the palpable ideal. To 
 suppose that in one case it is the work of a perfect organ 
 of vision, made to see objective truth, and in another the 
 work of an organ which must see false images only, is en- 
 tirely irrational. However superior as symbols the Jahveh 
 of the later Jews and the "Father " of Jesus may have been 
 to gods that dwelt in gold and silver statues in temples of 
 Babylon, they were none the less products of symboliza- 
 tion, not objective realities, — imperfect types of the inscru- 
 table substance, in which all men are contained. Just as 
 the sun has been universally the symbol of deity in these 
 and in all other forms of worship, just as light has been 
 for all men in all ages the undying symbol of ideal good, by 
 whatsoever name expressed, and yet both imperfect sym- 
 bols of the reality to which they point, — so with the more 
 distinctly anthropomorphic personal ideals in which men 
 have centred their faith and hope. Both the Semite and 
 the Iranian have found a loftier and purer meaning in 
 rehgious terms, in proportion to the degree in which they 
 represent the pure sense of personality. But that the 
 really objective truth of deity should be given in any of 
 these fragmentary forms, however beautiful, is impossible, 
 — first, because deity is infinite; and second, because the 
 symbolizer can only deal with such external beings or 
 
14 ELEMENTS. 
 
 phenomena as correspond to his inward ideal, which grows 
 as he grows. 
 
 ]/i other words, rehgious symbols are properly our hu- 
 man ideals taking external relation to us, that we may 
 adore them unselfishly, not as our own, nor as ourselves 
 at all, but as above ourselves. And men are the more 
 able to make such use of symbolism, the more their emo- 
 tion and their volition are expanded by social and moral 
 communion. The history of man is a striving to generalize 
 his experiences, to universalize his ideals ; and his will, 
 which is the energy that shapes these in its own likeness, 
 is also the diviner power that seeks and strives to lose it- 
 self in that which it adores. Thus, in the first flush of 
 self-conscious power, he makes his controlling experiences 
 stand for creative and productive gods. Then, dramatizing 
 nature and life in their interest, he constructs mythologies, 
 which are as free as possible in their origin from selfish 
 purpose, and so are in fact poetry and prophecy for all 
 time. The believers who saw purity in the fire, might and 
 calm in the ocean, imperishable guardianship in the stars, 
 divine benignity in Nile and Ganges, feeling in their steady 
 alternate rise and fall the pulsation of a mighty heart 
 which forever deposited the rich loam of far mountains to 
 receive the living sunbeams and seeds ; and out of these 
 symbols builded the fair humanities of old religions, so 
 similar through remotest spaces, — simply did what we are 
 doing when we fill heaven and earth with the signs and 
 tokens of whatsoever we most sincerely believe in, at the 
 same time showing its real counterpart in our human con- 
 duct. When we repeat after our fathers that God is one 
 and omnipresent, and then, like them, proceed to ascribe 
 qualities and purposes to His infinity which we know only 
 through finite experiences, and worship these as His, what 
 we have done is simply to lift these qualities out of man, 
 that we may in all honesty adore them as above ourselves. 
 
SYMBOLISM, 15 
 
 We are as truly symbolaters, or " idolaters," if that is the 
 word for the heathen, as the heathen are ; and we cannot 
 help it, so long as we demand forms of language as material 
 for religious intercourse. Love, Power, the Father, the 
 Spirit, the Word, are symbolic expansions of the highest 
 human powers and virtues. Races of men most marked 
 by self-assertion have always made their religious ideal an 
 Infinite Will. Or if, with the mystics of every faith, we 
 reverently refrain from ascribing any finite or definable 
 mode of existence to the Fulness of Being, we are still 
 reaching forth towards that pure Essence, which is known 
 to us only as implied in our own consciousness of exist- 
 ence. Finally, the Moral Order of the universe, which 
 religious science substitutes for all forms of external will, 
 can be recognized only through the conception of Law; 
 and the uniformity, continuity, and fidelity of law are sym- 
 bols of a moral and spiritual allegiance revealed only in the 
 constitution of the soul. Thus the progress of religious 
 symbolism, as related to the idea of God, is the reflex of 
 the phases of ideal human will. As related to the conduct 
 of man, the highest form it assumes is that of constructive 
 work. And this, too, depends on the growth of the per- 
 sonal ideal out of passive conformity into the energies of 
 liberty and love. Not more naturally does the inward 
 discipline of the Quaker select silence as the symbolic 
 medium of worship, or the sensuous dependence of the 
 Catholic prefer the arts of pomp, than the broad free 
 thought and open sympathies which are not bound to sect 
 or form, find their adequate expression in ways of enno- 
 bling work; bearing its living symbols of universal truth 
 and good as the tree its native fruit. 
 
 The universality of the symbolizing process indicates 
 that the relations with which it is concerned are real and 
 natural. In its great leading lines, therefore, its speech is 
 not arbitrary, nor the choice of fancy, but the permanent 
 
1 6 ELEMENTS. 
 
 expression of steadfast harmonies between the soul and 
 the outward world. The poet speaks to the common heart 
 simply because he has immediate sense of these natural 
 correspondences, which prove that the mirror in which 
 men see themselves is one and the same for all. He has 
 no license to alter or violate or ignore these relations. 
 The poetry of all times and tribes speaks through these a 
 common language, even of emotions; and alphabets are 
 but vehicles for transporting a currency everywhere valid. 
 Who, for example, could mistake the organic meaning, the 
 momentous human interest, which in all mythologies has 
 centred in the Tree? In the Babylonian sculptures, in the 
 Bible legend of the Fall, in the story of the same in the 
 Persian Bundehesh, in the Greek Garden of Hesperides, in 
 the old Phoenician vase-paintings, in the beliefs of antiquity 
 about the dragon-guarded gold-dust of the Scythian North, 
 we find the same image of a Tree of Life, guarded or in 
 some way controlled in its relations with the aspirations of 
 man by mythical dragons, or serpents, typical of perils of 
 the body or the soul. The terrors and splendors of fire 
 are associated with it; and the penalty of the Promethean 
 theft of fire for the benefit of mankind is but one symbol 
 out of many of the awe of man before his momentous 
 possession of an element which penetrates all nature and 
 all thought with an omnipotent energy : and for this the 
 early Aryan mind could find no better type than to call it 
 the fruit of an all-containing Cosmic Tree, and no use less 
 universal than to transmit the symbol in all the branches 
 of the race. From first to last, growtJi, human and per- 
 sonal, has found no better symbol than this,^ nor any that 
 can refuse affinity with that old Norse Yggdrasil, whose 
 ever-ascending top is in the unmeasured spaces, its roots 
 
 ' This is the sum of meaning involved in the universal use of the tree in Oriental symbol- 
 ism : the attempt of Lenormant and others to identify the Bible "tree of life" with the Per- 
 sian haoma, the Indian soma, and all other similar representations, is made in the interest of 
 Bible revelation, and has no scientific value. Contemporary Review, September, 1879. 
 
SYMBOLISM. 
 
 17 
 
 watered by the Fates of Time and the Well of Truth ; 
 while the squirrel runs up and down with incessant defi- 
 ances between the eagle that watches in its boughs and the 
 serpent that gnaws at its foot. 
 
 Nor can we admit that the older religions, as contrasted 
 with Christianity and Judaism, are specially chargeable 
 with worshipping the symbol in place of that which it sig- 
 nifies ; in other words, with allowing the image to intercept 
 and absorb the honor due to the ideal. Religious senti- 
 ment, of necessity, becomes absorbed in what represents 
 its ideal. And is not this as true of the Christian sym- 
 bolism of Trinity and Incarnation, as it was of the older 
 worship of sun and stars? Is it not as true of Hebrew 
 Talmudism, and Catholic Papism, or Mariolatry, and Pro- 
 testant Bibliolatry, as it is of the Hindu's recitation of his 
 Gayatri verses ? When the symbol is embraced by senti- 
 ment, thought becomes identified with its object, and what 
 represents its God practically becomes its God. In no 
 case, however, is the fact disproved that there exists in all 
 civilized thought a more or less distinct acknowledgment 
 of some divine transcendence of the symbol abiding in the 
 deeper experience. And while it is true of the cruder 
 forms not of one but of every religion, that the symbol 
 does intercept and hold the worshipper's interest, veiling 
 the pure truth as more or less abstract and unreal, — even 
 as the confessional shuts off the essential meanings of 
 right and wrong, and as the religious custom or creed 
 hides the Infinite Life it would limit and define, — yet it is 
 equally true of the higher stages in all religions that their 
 symbolism embodies the spirit of the Brahman prayer: 
 " Open, O world-sustaining Sun, the entrance to truth, 
 hidden by thy vase of dazzling light. Soften thy splen- 
 dors, that I may behold thy true being ! From the unreal, 
 lead me to the real ! " ^ 
 
 * Brihad Upanishad, V. xiv. 
 2 
 
1 8 ELEMENTS. 
 
 There is, however, a real difference between ancient and 
 modern symbohsm. The more self-conscious religion be- 
 comes, the more strongly its symbolism tends to become 
 distinctively personal. From natural phenomena it has 
 passed over to purely human. It is, of course, in some 
 points of view, in the interest of progress to represent the 
 ideal by conscious forces, in place of outward physical 
 types. But the integrity of the cosmos requires that 
 thought should express itself by things ; that man should 
 find, or make, this very world in his own image. The 
 health of character is in its stress to outward embodiment; 
 and whatever divorces religious experience from this, — 
 whatever prevents the natural escape from self-conscious- 
 ness into living forms of action, — represses earnestness and 
 narrows thought. The supreme Ideal, which we call God, 
 is not limited to personality, to the individualism of con- 
 scious will. God is cosmical : whatever inscrutable sub- 
 stance that adjective may typify, is God. The phenomena 
 of the universe, inclusive of human activities, interpreted 
 by its laws of order, are the true symbolism of the Spirit. 
 Materialism, as expressing the direct purpose and instant 
 end of mind, is as just a term as it is unsatisfactory when 
 used to define the origination of mind. Science restores 
 this natural relation of man and the world, which the primal 
 instincts of religion affirmed, but which theologies absorbed 
 in self-consciousness have broken. To what has heretofore 
 been called " matter," with little regard to its essential re- 
 lations to spiritual substance, science secures its forgotten 
 rights. As a consequence, the pure identity of thought 
 with thing, of essence with manifestation, of substance with 
 symbol, must come to full recognition, bringing withal that 
 directness of relation between thought and action which the 
 highest conscience commands in the name of integrity, 
 and which ennobles human nature by due respect to the 
 senses and the world. This directness of real symbolism 
 
SYMBOLISM. 19 
 
 amounts, in its ideal, to nothing less instant than one's un- 
 conscious expression of his emotions through the features, 
 or of his vitality through the lungs and the heart. And 
 if, as yet, we are far from apprehending the nobler fruits 
 of these ages of material science ; if we are still inapt to 
 find the higher meanings of this our unfathomed cosmos 
 of inviolable laws, — doubtless it is for lack of those ideals 
 in ourselves which would give such symbolic meanings to 
 what we see and do. The world is waiting, not for our 
 knowledge only, but for our worship and our love. Is it 
 in itself the less capable of responding in living parable to 
 the noblest aspirations of men, because as yet men do not 
 demand such response ; because we have been using it for 
 merely mechanical and competitive purposes ; because 
 our hot haste to master its treasures has covered with 
 whirling dust the meekness of the wind-flower and the 
 patient-girded watch of the stars? 
 
 But while we recognize the tendency of the later stages 
 and larger development of self-conscious personality to 
 check in some ways, for a time, the direct contact of the ideal 
 in man with pure nature through symbolic expression, we 
 must again emphasize the fact that it was the earlier stages 
 of the same self-conscious will that gave to symbolism its 
 first powerful impulse ; because in these stages man first 
 learns to act as a force distinct from his surroundings, and 
 so to use the world with clear knowledge that it does rep- 
 resent his own ideal. As we have found this personal ele- 
 ment to be the special characteristic of the Iranian mind, 
 we are prepared to find symbolism especially prominent in 
 its religion ; and in this we are nowise disappointed. The 
 development of this tendency is here upon a scale that can 
 be called no less than typical in the history of thought. 
 
20 ELEMENTS. 
 
 THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 
 
 The common impression that the rehgion of Zoroaster 
 is distinctively the rehgion which centres in the Fire-sym- 
 bol, is erroneous. Pyrolatry is common to all religions. 
 No other natural element so perfectly represents supreme 
 force as the element of fire. As light, it is the universally 
 recognized symbol of truth ; as heat, of love ; as cosmic 
 vital energy, of conscious being ; as astronomical centre, 
 of unity; as all-producing and all-sustaining, of creative 
 and providential care. Like personality and will, it mounts 
 back to its source, and will not be cut off thence. Pene- 
 trating, stirring, and shaping all things, it is the image of 
 every pure, perfect, irrepressible power. It is the first- 
 born of creation : germ, seed, and atom, the children of its 
 play. The soul itself is said to glance down from heaven 
 as a beam of light, and as a beam to return whence it came. 
 For all tribes from India to Peru, the fire burning on the 
 altar, fed by the purest and most vigilant that it may never 
 become extinct, is the type of security, immortality, and 
 adequate care. Into this holy hearth-flame {Hestia), 
 parent of the city, the homestead, the shrine, awful to gods 
 and inviolable by men, no defiled thing shall enter. For 
 the Greek, the solemnity of oaths sat there to rule Olym- 
 pus itself; for the Roman, the guardianship of the State. 
 The Vedic Aryan saw Agni rise from his primitive fire- 
 churn, to bring down the blessings of the gods, the flame 
 his living tongue, his leaping steed, swift as thought to 
 make earth and heaven one. The Turanian Magi of Media 
 adored the same element. How the Semite's passion 
 played all its keys on this element of fire, — Assyrian, 
 Phoenician, Hebrew, — in symbols of creation, preservation, 
 destruction, in sexual and ascetic rage, in a self-abandon- 
 ment which could find no fitter image than passing his 
 children through the flame ! His Jahveh seals covenants 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 21 
 
 with men by moving in a smoky flame between the parted 
 offerings; ^ burns in Sinai, in the desert pillar, in the face 
 of Moses, over the Ark. He is not only a fire that devours 
 the sacrifice, but a blaze no man can see and live. To 
 Christianity he descends in the shining cloud, the trans- 
 figured countenance, the judgment-fires, that attend its 
 mythological Christ. Nor can Jesus find any symbol of 
 the coming of " his kingdom " more suitable than the 
 lightning's flash from east to west. With what ease and 
 grace this type absorbs all others ! " Allah," says the 
 Koran, " is a flame burning like a star, as a lamp set in 
 pure glass within a niche." ^ " Ibrahim," says El Masudi, 
 " having worshipped the stars and the sun, and grown to 
 the higher worship of Allah, was thrown into flames by the 
 giant Nimrod, but the flames refused to burn, and not a 
 fire could be kindled anywhere on earth that day." ^ 
 " Father and mother of all gods," says the Aztec hymn, 
 " is the fire-god (lightning) ; a bird with gleaming wings in 
 the centre of the world." The modern Kirghis Tartars so 
 venerate fire that they will not spit into it.* The tribes of 
 Kafiristan cast their offerings through flames.^ From the 
 simple faith of the Iroquois, that when the tribal fire went 
 out the tribe would perish, to the refined myth of Prome- 
 theus, evolved from the primitive mystery of the generation 
 of flame by rubbing two bits of wood, into clear and full 
 expression of the pains and penalties under which social 
 progress is won for man, — through the endless maze of 
 tender and yearning superstitions associated with produc- 
 ing and preserving the element of fire, runs the conscious- 
 ness of mankind that this element is the centre of social 
 relations, the fountain of home, of art, of culture, of civ- 
 ilization. And so poetry and religion anticipated the 
 crowning recognition by science that life and growth are 
 
 ^ Gen. XV. 17. * Sura xxiv. ' Meadows of Gold, etc., p. 83. 
 
 * Hutton : Central Asia, p. 325. * Central Asia, p. 421. 
 
22 ELEMENTS. 
 
 but the extension of the solar fires. So continuous is 
 man's organic rapport with fire, that it is difiicult to draw 
 the hne where his direct, instinctive fear, awe, or love 
 passes into conscious use of the symbol to express his 
 feelings or thoughts ; still harder to mark where the per- 
 sonal imagery reaches up into the sphere of pure imagina- 
 tion, and deals in essential relations and creative laws. But 
 that this one visible symbol sweeps the whole compass of 
 human experience in its plastic power, that fire is the very 
 speech and garment of the spirit of man, is sure. 
 
 It should seem more practicable to distinguish the stage 
 of growth in which fire as a mere element is the all- 
 absorbing symbol, from, that in which the religious sense 
 is concentrated on its more distinct and dominant forms, 
 especially such as the sun and stars. Solar mythology 
 would thus mark a stage beyond the primitive forms of 
 pyrolatry, as representing a distincter reference to personal 
 meanings and an escape from the vagueness of unconscious 
 instinct. The oldest Aryan fire-gods do in fact flow into 
 each other, as if their common symbol merely expressed 
 those transitions of feeling which in the rude man refuse to 
 be held in prescribed or permanent conditions. Neither 
 in Bactria, nor in Vedic India, more than in Turan, nor 
 even afterwards in the Persia of Herodotus, do they take, 
 like individuals, to dwelling in temples. Their simple 
 altars rise on mountain-tops, in the open spaces of light, 
 where sun and stars are but portions of the all-sufficient 
 elemental life of fire. The sun, on the contrary, has always 
 his shrine, usually his human image. In the terrible arrows 
 of his beams, in the majesty of his rolling orb, and in his 
 battle with the clouds and storms, he penetrates man's 
 consciousness like a tremendous will : he must be received 
 through some softening mediating image, in some walled 
 space where his splendors shall be veiled. The moon and 
 stars also require temples, images, and human mediators, 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 2$ 
 
 for the opposite reason that they seem so far away, while 
 yet exercising a control whose grand, silent mystery man 
 ever yearns to penetrate. Hence the mythology of nations 
 like the Irano-Persian, Greek, and Hebrew, in whom the 
 personal life has been developed, centres in the sun's 
 course; and the adventures of their gods are even trace- 
 able through all the mazes of Protean names and dramatic 
 situations, back to his all-embracing movement, the stages 
 and strifes of his diurnal march, the alternation of day with 
 night crowned with moon and stars. In this relation be- 
 tween astrolatry in its largest sense and the progress of 
 man to distinct personal consciousness, it is perhaps pos- 
 sible to find historic vestiges of two distinct stages. Much 
 ingenuity has been spent, and not without success, at least 
 for the study of Semitic races, on proving that the moon 
 and star cult is older than that of the sun, — representing 
 the nomadic, as that does the more developed life of the 
 agriculturist and townsman. To the wanderer of the 
 steppes, night brings coolness and relief; to the settled 
 laborer, the sun's bounty is more conspicuous ; and it is 
 argued in detail that the sun-myths are always myths of 
 higher civilization than those of the moon and stars, with 
 which they are historically in conflict, as the war of nomad 
 and settled laborer is the standing strife of the early world.^ 
 That the real and historic order of progress is here caught 
 sight of, is probably true. 
 
 But though solar myths may represent a social advance 
 in comparison with lunar, especially among the Semitic 
 races, we can hardly explain the star-worship of the west- 
 ern portion of Iran, as compared with the pure pyrolatry 
 of the eastern, upon the same theory of advance in per- 
 sonal self-consciousness. In the valley of the Euphrates, 
 where cities and cultures supervened upon the nomadic 
 life, astrolatry was a natural tradition, passing on into those 
 
 1 Goldziher : Mythology among the Hebrews. 
 
24 ELEMENTS. 
 
 astronomical studies in which, as all writers agree, the 
 Chaldeans, if not founders,^ were at least typical represent- 
 atives in the ancient world. That their civilization was so 
 self-conscious and intellectual, may well explain the close 
 connection of their celestial symbolism with personal qual- 
 ities and emotions. But does the less concentrated pyrol- 
 atry of eastern Iran, which was developed into the religion 
 of Zoroaster, imply a lack of personal self-conscious will? 
 Our whole investigation will be found to show the con- 
 trary. If I am not mistaken, the explanation of the differ- 
 ence between these two lines of symbolism lies in the more 
 vigorous sense of liberty, individual and tribal, which dis- 
 tinguished the eastern from the western Iranians, and more 
 particularly the Iranian Aryans from the Turanians and 
 Semites. In the former class of tribes, the will claimed 
 ideal rights for itself; while in the latter, its peculiar inten- 
 sity, in passion and desire, which made self-control and 
 self-reliance impossible, drove it to worship such ideal 
 rights in some supreme authority, whether in God or man. 
 Thus the western Iranians fell under vast imperial or relig- 
 ious tyrannies. The eastern tribes worshipped a person- 
 ality in their gods and heroes, reflected from their own ; 
 and therefore dependent on their free spirit, rather than 
 suppressing it. This fundamental distinction is of the 
 highest importance, and will, I think, be made fully evi- 
 dent in our future studies. It goes back, on the one hand, 
 to the earliest free Aryan or Indo-Iranian life;^ on the 
 other, to the material and subservient civilization of the old 
 Turanian and Cushite races, and to Semitic self-abandon- 
 ment to the passions. 
 
 On this difference of character is based the contrast in 
 the fire-symbolism of eastern and Avestern Iran, not on 
 any such distinction as that of nomadic from settled life. 
 The Bactrian Aryans were led by an inherent individual 
 
 1 As Pliny calls them. ^ See the author's India, chapter on " Primitive Aryas." 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 2$ 
 
 energy, which kept them broken up into heroic tribes, 
 ever standing for their rights, and made the heroic element 
 the all-controlhng one in their mythology. Their moral 
 nerve found its adequate symbol in the free flash of fire, 
 rather than in any permanent or fixed image, like the sun, 
 moon, or stars. Fire itself, in its pure universality and 
 freedom, was more to them than any such exclusive em- 
 bodiment, moored, as it were, in space and form. The very 
 multitude of forms and names under which they celebrated 
 it in their later ritual, indicates the freedom in which the 
 symbol moved. It seems as if this powerful personality 
 pursued its visible counterpart throughout nature, seizing 
 all possible transformations of its substance for its own 
 purposes, resolved to use the symbol, not to be used by it. 
 The Zoroastrian meant by fire whatever was noblest in 
 personal will ; and would not allow that it ever destroyed 
 life, even when one was burned to death.^ It must serve 
 life, not destroy it. 
 
 The pure pyrolatry of the East was not therefore a mere 
 crude indeterminate fear before the element of fire, but 
 rather that intuition of its essential symbolic relations 
 which could take up any visible form or phase of it at 
 will, and put religious significance into all. Even in the 
 Vedas the freedom of choice, now described, begins to 
 limit itself; and while the simple fire-churn is still the 
 centre of faith and awe, hymns to the sun occupy a very 
 large place in the imagination of the poet. There can be 
 no question but that in the oldest heroic legends of Persia, 
 which the Shah-Nameh has preserved, and whose leading 
 figures — Yima, Thraetona, Keregagpa, etc., with the con- 
 flict against the dragon king Zohak — are celebrated in the 
 Avesta itself, we have transformations of very old Aryan 
 symbols of the solar fire, in its visible powers and relations, 
 its strife with the rain-cloud and the night.^ It is equally 
 
 ^ Vendidad, v. 30. ^ See Darmesteter : Ormazd ct A hriman, as referred to further on. 
 
26 ELEMENTS. 
 
 probable that the manifold labors and sufiferings of heroes 
 like Rustem and Siavaksh belong in their original forms to 
 the same solar cycle, and correspond with those of the 
 Greek or Tyrian Heracles (Dionysus). This transforma- 
 tion of the fire-symbol into heroic, rather than contempla- 
 tive or quiescent, types of divinity illustrates very forcibly 
 that freedom from oppressive limitations which we have 
 already ascribed to the energetic personality of the eastern 
 Iranians. The sun was their typical hero in the fields of 
 heaven. It was Ormuzd casting Ahriman into his native 
 darkness. The later Persians swore by the sun. Its crys- 
 tal image hung in the royal tent, and the king was called by 
 its name. "From the sun," says the Avesta, " are all things 
 sought that man can desire." Through the wliolc history 
 of Aryan faith runs also the fire-symbolism of Mithra, 
 beginning in Vedic vagueness, as the kindled fire,^ but 
 concentrating gradually in itself all noble and spiritual 
 meanings, recognized by the psalmists, which could be 
 represented by the sun, and especially the sovereignty of 
 truth and justice; till, mingling with Chaldean elements, 
 it is all gathered up into the wonderful Mithra- Yasht of 
 the Avesta, unsurpassed in its symbolic expression of 
 duty, love, and power in the life of man. All the Greek 
 authors identify Mithra with the sun. Nor do the stars, in- 
 dividually or as constellations, fail of honor in the Avesta, 
 — all the conscious functions of stellar service freely mov- 
 ing around the element of fire as their common and central 
 force. 
 
 The Iraniaa Aryan was specially gifted w'ith the sense of 
 immediate relation between ideas and things : his main con- 
 cern was to bring the body into correlation with the mind. 
 This was the sum of Avestan ethics, " pure mind in pure 
 body." Not mind here, body there ; not mind above, body 
 below; neither the one nor the other alone living by its own 
 
 1 RiS-Veda, v. 3, 1-3. Muir, pt. iv. p. 6S. 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 2/ 
 
 force, but the one in the other, representing itself by the 
 other. Therefore he thought and hved in symbols of con- 
 scious will. Every natural form that could possibly reflect 
 his motive-energy took a typical personality for his imagi- 
 nation. No equal gift of personifying abstract qualities and 
 ideas in visible images, with that displayed in the Avesta, 
 appears in any other Bible of the world.^ Even the latest 
 construction of the religious cycle, the Zrvan-akarana, or 
 " Time without Bounds " of the Sassanian Persians, was 
 the development of a mere category of existence into the 
 supreme personal source of good and evil. The seven 
 Ai/iesha-cpentas are mostly abstractions turned into gods. 
 Every religious name like Haoma, VoJm-mano, Ako-vtano, 
 is at once a personal force and the thing which suggests 
 or typifies such a force.^ So with beggary, treachery, 
 poverty, winter, sleep, desire, the evil eye, pride, contempt, 
 disease, etc.*^ The whole cosmos, in its multiplicity of ac- 
 tive powers, was subjected to apotheosis in the same way. 
 But through all this specialism pyrolatry itself, the love 
 of the fire-element itself and for itself, retains its control. 
 The Avestan priest is AtJirava, " provided with fire." 
 Down to the present day the Parsis, like their fathers, 
 regard the fire-altar {Atesh-gdJi), or ever-burning naphtha- 
 spring, the hearth of their faith. They discern Ahuramazda 
 himself, not in the solar orb exclusively, nor in the starry 
 heavens, nor in the lightning, but \x\firc: this is " his son," 
 his " first-born," his " image," his manifested self* To fire, 
 the Persian kings addressed their prayer before battle ; on 
 their death it was solemnly extinguished. For whatever 
 purposes used, even in domestic life, in labor, or in art, it 
 must be brought after a certain period to a holy place, as 
 belonging to Ahuramazda.^ 
 
 1 See, for illustration, Spiegel's Eranische Alterihumskimde, ii. i. 
 - See Bleeck's Va(na, ix. note i. 
 
 3 'SifiS. Eranische Alterthuinsku>ide,\\. 135; P'endiddd, iCvx.. 140; ii. 116. 
 * Ya(na, iv. 52. '' Vendidad, viii. 
 
28 ELEMENTS. 
 
 " Offering and praise I vow to thee, O Fire, son of Ahura ! Be 
 thou honored in the dwelHngs of men ! Blessed the man who con- 
 stantly brings the fuel and the implements of service to thee ! 
 
 " Mayest thou burn evermore in this house, through the long time, 
 to the resurrection day ! Give me swift brightness, food, and means 
 of life ! Give me wisdom and prosperity, and readiness of speech ! 
 Give my soul sense and understanding ever growing; courage, the 
 ready foot, and swift to move ! Give vigilance, abundant posterity, 
 pure and able to bless my house, my clan, my province, my country ! 
 Give me knowledge of the better world, of the shining abode ! May 
 I reach good reward, and good name, and my soul's bliss ! "^ 
 
 Other symbols had Httle value, save as partaking of this, 
 or of what this signified. What attracted Iranian imagina- 
 tion was not any fixed form or function, but pure energy 
 of life and growth, which, as the substance of personality 
 v/ithin, sought its own fit outward type in the free element 
 of fire. All its splendid symbolism meant this unquench- 
 able ardor of desire and will. There was the Cypress, life 
 irrepressible, flame-like in shape and in persistent upward 
 pressure. It shall be type of immortality. Zarathustra 
 plants it before the fire-temple, and when it has grown 
 niajestic, surrounds it with a golden palace like a sheath 
 of flame, and is called to ascend from its boughs to Para- 
 dise.^ There was the Pine-cone, flame-like again, and from 
 perennial fires of growth. This shall be the Athrava's type 
 of life, which he bears to the altar-service. Both these are 
 forms of that clearest symbol of life and progress, the Tree; 
 from which man and woman are said in Iranian mythology 
 to have sprung, the two from one stem.^ The Haoma, a.t 
 once divine plant and beautiful youth, is type of the living 
 and saving Word, bringing strength and joy alike to soul 
 and sense, making the poor and rich equal.^ It grows in 
 the sea that flows with life fountains, where birds scatter 
 the seeds of life, and the sharp-eyed, swift-winged eagle of 
 
 ' Va^na, Ixi. ^ See Humboldt's Cosmos (quoting Firdflsi), ii. n. 129. 
 
 8 Bundchesh. * Kaf«a, x. 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 29 
 
 wisdom (Simurgh) and the watchful fish protect it from 
 harm.^ Was it strange that the morning cock and the 
 night-guarding dog should be associated as types with 
 these practical energies? Especially was the bull sacred 
 to this sense of vital forces ; and his " soul " pours out 
 prayers to Ahura for protection against the outrages of 
 evil powers.^ Above all, the Ferotirs {FravasJns), ideal 
 types of the souls of men, hovering above their heads, were 
 adored for the glory of their light, — pure bodies of flame, 
 and defenders of man against evil; and their title signifies 
 victory and growth.^ 
 
 Instinctively the Persians transferred to their supreme 
 God that Assyrian symbol of deity, the winged circle 
 .enclosing a human figure in vigorous action. The bull 
 with open wings, the eagle with hawk's head, the four- 
 winged cherubim aad wheels of the prophet's vision,* 
 were all suited to the vital personality of the Iranian mind, 
 whether of Aryan or Semitic, western or eastern origin ; 
 and while the monuments show how readily these were 
 accepted by the Persian " fire-worshipper " from races 
 more inclined than himself to fix the symbol in elaborate 
 forms of art, they all betray limitations in the expression 
 of nerve-energy when contrasted with the unconfined 
 ethereal flame with which he had already satisfied his 
 demand for freedom. 
 
 Such was the imagery, aesthetic and religious, with which 
 the eastern Iranians lifted nature to the height of their own 
 intense life of aspiration and will ; such the opening stage 
 of those forms of civilization Avhich have followed Iran in 
 giving the same symbolic meaning, in a great variety of 
 
 ^ Ynsht xii. i ; xiv. 2g ; xvi. 7. Spiegel's Avesin, iii. xiv. 
 
 2 It is liis seed that makes Nature's fertility. It is probable that the symbol goes back to 
 the old Aryan storm-cloud. The seed of the bull is the dew. (Vashl, vii. 4. ) The cry to 
 Ormuzd is the roar of the storm conflict. Darmesteter: Oriiinzd et A hritnan, ]i. 151. 
 
 • See Neriosengh. Schwenck, Die Mythologie der Perser. p. 314. 
 
 * The angels guarding Paradise, in Genesis, were these Chaldeo-Assyrian creatures. 
 
30 ELEMENTS. 
 
 directions, to their whole social existence. So that we are 
 here met by the spontaneous and child-like poetry of the 
 grandly awakening human consciousness of personal Will, 
 bearing in its bosom the germs of three thousand years of 
 progress. Here are no mere figures of speech selected by 
 the understanding, no allegories consciously constructed, 
 but natural correspondences intuitively recognized. This 
 most responsive symbol, which stirs and waves and flashes 
 to heaven with the motion of the flame within the soul, is 
 the very tongue of prayer, the very garment of praise. 
 
 We may theorize as we will on the organic relations 
 between Iranian nerve-force and its physical environment. 
 This at least is certain : Iran was indeed the true fire- 
 temple of Nature, bespread with naphtha springs, meteoric, 
 lights, and burning mountains. The mystery of the flame 
 brooded over it and burst from its bosom. To this day 
 the hot winds parch the dry grass till they want but a 
 spark to fan it into flame ; and the stars shine through the 
 clear atmosphere with a splendor that seems articulate with 
 spiritual meaning and relation. No religious symbolism 
 could seem more natural or imperative on such a region 
 than that of fire. Yet, as we have seen, special race-quali- 
 ties greatly contributed to the result. We have seen that 
 the Persians absorbed Assyrian and Babylonian imagery 
 without subordinating their passion for the pure fire-sym- 
 bol to any of these distinctive models. The reason was, 
 that they represented the Iranian idealism of Will in a freer 
 and more personal form than did the nations farther west. 
 These last, directed by Semitic self-abandonment to sen- 
 suous impulse, came to worship will in the form of great 
 religious and political systems of arbitrary power. In the 
 eastern tribes, the preponderance of Aryan energy pro- 
 duced a high degree of individuality. The Aryan held 
 fast to the personal pole of the symbolic process, and used 
 the external object as representative of his own force. The 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 3 1 
 
 Semite buried himself in the physical side of the same 
 process, and suftered its organized power to master him. 
 The slavish sensualism of these Semitic cults was illus- 
 trated by the golden bed of Bel, spread in the temple at 
 Babylon by his priesthood, for the sacrifice of virginity 
 to their worship of the senses. Assyrian and Babylonian 
 chambers of imagery had become the synonym or type of 
 sensual idolatry in the East, when the Persian entered them 
 from his rude mountains. Upon them, as upon Egyptian 
 polytheistic rites and animal worship, he came down in 
 fires of judgment. He was the iconoclast of religious sym- 
 bols. In the name of his "living light" he smote down 
 the bull of Egypt and blasted the couch of Bel. He sub- 
 stituted for the older gods of concrete forms ideal genii and 
 immortal powers, — unseen hosts warring for principles in 
 the awful names of good and evil, right and wrong. He 
 suffered no name to stand between him and the Almighty 
 Spirit, whose son and messenger was the living universal 
 flame. ^ In this claim for the free personality of man in his 
 attitude towards forms of the ideal, the eastern Aryan 
 stood alone. Even the Hebrew escaped the common 
 slavery of the Semite to sensuous symbols through his 
 prophets only, and there only partially. When his fetich- 
 ism and Moloch worship had been developed into Mono- 
 theism by an intense nationality, even its intense sorrows, 
 and the sharp disciplines of its contact with other races 
 and faiths, could not bring Jahvism to recognize the 
 rights of the personal Will. Under the absolutism of its 
 God, the demand for knowledge, the right of ethnic sym- 
 pathy and expansion became almost null. In his nobler 
 elements, this all-mastering personality represented the 
 
 1 Nothing, I think, can be more erroneous than the statement of Rapp {Zeitschr. d. 
 Deuisch- JilorgeiU. GeseUsch. xix ) that Zoroastrianism never rose beyond the standpoint of 
 immediate naturalism, while Buddhism and Christianity became universal religions. If, as 
 he says, Zoroastrianism was only fitted for Iran (p. 37), this was true only of its peculiar form, 
 not of its essence 
 
32 ELEMENTS. 
 
 authority of conscience as well as will ; but it was con- 
 science raised into a terrible theocracy, in which human 
 freedom was systematically sunk to that degree that a 
 religious reaction to the purely inward law of individual- 
 ity, without external symbol of the earlier kinds, became 
 a moral necessity: and hence Essenism and Christianity. 
 But Christianity, itself Semitic, substituted a body of 
 equally dominating personal symbols for the old institu- 
 tional or legal ones, and the authority of the Christ became 
 as exacting a mastership as that of the law. An infinite 
 Ruler of the World, a Jahveh conceived as Father no less 
 than Judge, commissions a Messiah to save the world that 
 should believe in Him, or his Son; to establish conditions 
 of salvation, — moral, spiritual, ecclesiastical. And this per- 
 sonal government of the Christ, this continuation of the 
 objective Semitic monarchy, so controlled the later dog- 
 matics of Christianity that the more or less Aryan element 
 fell into its track; and its exaltation of the man Jesus into 
 Godhood was far from lifting the human personality as 
 such into similar spiritual relations, and so affirming its 
 proper freedom. This exclusivcness of the Christ-symbol 
 the real Aryan element, embodied in science and free 
 thought, has been nearly two thousand years in over- 
 coming. 
 
 For the Persian, the individual was the living flame of 
 Ahura, in full and pure communion with His purpose, and 
 like Him master of the fulness of the fire-symbol and its 
 power to consume all the evil in the world. Ahura is 
 indeed person, in the fullest sense. He creates the world 
 by His word, like Jahveh, and all theories of cosmic self- 
 development are wholly foreign to the Persian as to the 
 Hebrew or Christian mind. But the human is not so lost 
 in Him as in the terrible Jahveh, whom, none can see and 
 live ; before whom human will is blasphemy, and the sole 
 right attitude of man that of prostrate abdication of every 
 
THE FIRE-SYMBOL. 33 
 
 claim and right of his own. Ahura is no destroyer per se, 
 no mixture of good and evil, but the pure essence of good. 
 It is true, too, that Zarathustra was regarded as a mediator; 
 but it was without touching his purely human nature: he 
 is treated by Ahura simply as one among the children of 
 men. 
 
 The Persian, in short, was an influx of human self-asser- 
 tion ; and the religion in which his energy took shape was 
 a flow of spontaneous inward force. When the inevitable 
 period of organization came, absorbing much of this free 
 spirit, and the Athrava became merged in the Magus (prob- 
 ably first in Media, then in Babylonia), the original impulse 
 revived in the reaction by which the Magi were suppressed 
 and the pure worship of Ahura restored by the great 
 Darius. But of course the tendency of time, ritual, organ- 
 ization, and traditional forms, in Western Asia, was to sink 
 this freedom of the fire-symbol in positive heliolatry. 
 When the sun, as personal symbol, usurped the place of 
 the pure flame of Ahura, Iranian genius had degenerated. 
 This is evident in the national degradation down to Sas- 
 sanian times. Persian edicts of the fourth and fifth cen- 
 turies commanded that the sun should be held the highest 
 deity, while water and fire should have inferior service.^ 
 Christians were persecuted for refusing to perform these 
 rites in Armenia.^ In Rome, Julian centred his revival of 
 Paganism in the philosophy which permitted him to call 
 the sun the living image of God, and even God himself'^ 
 But nothing could so fully indicate the disappearance of 
 the pure fire-symbol, and its specially Persian type of per- 
 sonality, as the mad freak of Elagabalus, who worshipped 
 the sun under the form of a black, conical stone.^ The old 
 flame-symbol had meant a spiritual power, warring against 
 
 1 Act. Martyr., quoted in Rapp, Zeiisckr. d. Deuisck. Morgenl. Geselhch. xix. 72. 
 ^ History of Vartan, by Bishop Elisaeus (translated by Newman), p. 9. 
 ° Gibbon, chap, xxiii. 
 * Ibid., chap. vi. 
 
 3 
 
34 ELEMENTS. 
 
 evil spirits in Nature and man. It did not so much seek 
 to put God into shape for man, as to put man in the way 
 of participating in God, and aiding His will and work. It 
 was the poetry of aspiration, not the prostration of self- 
 abandonment. Its deity was purpose, will, principle ; too 
 free and spiritual to need temples, too personal to want the 
 flesh of sacrifice when he could receive the soul of the vic- 
 tim.^ Its construction of special rituals and statues grew 
 only by contact with Semitic civilizations.^ Nothing can 
 be more free from ceremonialism than the older Gathas of 
 the Avesta, the earliest literature of the faith. The Per- 
 sian turned the gods of the West out of doors to confront 
 Nature, and if they could not breathe its fresh air, to die. 
 
 * Strabo, chap. xv. 
 
 ' In later times statues were common in Persia. (See Clem. Homil. ix.) It is an ab- 
 surd theory of Spiegel, that Persian hostility to images came from Semitism ! (Erd?i. 
 Alterth. i. 393.) 
 
II. 
 
 THE MORAL SENSE. 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 
 
 ELEMENTS OF ITS CULTURE. 
 
 THE beginning of personality, — in other words, the 
 consciousness of self as distinct from its surround- 
 ings, — is, in a special sense, the advent of the Will as a 
 positive power. It opens the way for transforming inward 
 into outward force, ideas into things. The mental habit 
 of combining the two sides of our being, making ideal use 
 of actual materials, is the condition of progress. Neither 
 an individual, nor a race, nor humanity itself, advances by 
 any other method than that of creating symbols of its 
 own ideal experience in the world of the senses, through 
 the energy of personal will. Of this energy the Iranians 
 were the typical race of the early world, heralds of the will- 
 power which continues to transform Nature into the image 
 of humanity. The rare union of sensuousness with ideality, 
 of physical susceptibility with personal force and earnest- 
 ness, which we shall find to have distinguished the Persians 
 from the races around them, is the key to their fire-cidtics, 
 the form of religious symbolism most significant of these 
 qualities. Zoroastrianism makes this element the ideal 
 bond of man with the universe. 
 
 Our metaphysical analysis, then, explains the symbolism 
 which so strongly marks the Iranian religions. But sym- 
 bolism is not the only force which awakes into energy at 
 the advent of the conscious will. Of course, this epoch is 
 the true birth of the Moral Sense also : not of conscience 
 absolutely, but of moral choice as a self-conscious and 
 
38 ELEMENTS. 
 
 creative force. Thus we should expect from the personal 
 qualities of the eastern Iranians that their ideal would 
 centre in moral conflict and discipline. It was in the fer- 
 ment of their motive-energies that they learned the pro- 
 found meaning of moral choice, — the balance of the soul 
 and the world 'twixt good and evil. The contrast and con- 
 flict of powers in Nature, which had vaguely impressed the 
 desires and fears of mankind, were for them drawn more 
 sharply by the battle of moral forces within. The con- 
 science had awaked with the will, and shared its ardor. 
 When we consider the strength of their impulse to put the 
 ideal into visible and natural life, we shall not be surprised 
 at the part played by moral protest and reaction, even in 
 warring against the outward obstacles in its way. The 
 polarities of light and dark, on which the order of Na- 
 ture turns, embodied and reflected this strife between the 
 senses and the spirit. This was symbolism in its ideal 
 form. The war of Ormuzd and Ahriman was a war, not 
 of embodied beings, still less of institutions, but of essen- 
 tial principles. It was the substance of their brain, and 
 made the fires that ran along their nerves, back and forth, 
 a battle. They did not build up that terrible Dualism with 
 the speculative intellect. We have little to do here, at 
 least in the earlier stages of the faith, with theological or 
 philosophical systems. It is the articulate voice of the 
 moral alternative, passing judgment upon the world as a 
 whole, rending the elements asunder in a schism of oppos- 
 ing wills. If a race deserves honor in human annals, in 
 proportion to the emphasis it has given to the radical 
 conflict of principles on which moral progress begins, to 
 /the practical energy of its eff'ort to meet and solve the 
 antagonisms of experience, a very high place is due to the 
 Persians of the Avesta. 
 
 With these Iranian tribes, then, begins the consciousness 
 of a shaping power, through moral conflict, upon Nature 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 39 
 
 and life, whose epochs are the steps of history through the 
 modern ages. For this force of personal Will was not in 
 the lower races which preceded them in Africa or Asia. 
 It was not in the higher civilizations of India and China, 
 where the predominant place was held, as we have seen, 
 by brain or muscle, abstract thought or concrete work; 
 while in Iran it belonged to the nerve that makes them 
 one, to that motive-force of will which quickens the mind 
 to progress as an ideal aim. With the Iranians begins a 
 poetic ardor for self-discipline, a passion for winning ideal 
 virtue by honest payment of the price. The external cir- 
 cumstances by which these powers were fostered are now 
 to be stated. 
 
 These differences between the Indian and Iranian 
 branches of the great Aryan family, after their separation, 
 — the one to the south, the other to the west of their 
 common home on the plateaus of Central Asia, — have 
 been regarded as of a very radical nature. Nothing, it is 
 thought, can explain them, especially those of their reli- 
 gious beliefs, but a bitter schism, resulting in the transfor- 
 mation of the gods of the one race into the demons of the 
 other. But this theory, of which history certainly affords 
 no other evidence than that of language, seems quite un- 
 satisfactory, even on that score. It is sufficient to reply 
 to the few instances given of such reversed meaning in the 
 names of gods, that corresponding changes went on in 
 at least one of these names, and that the most important, 
 in India itself, without revolution, simply through the nat- 
 ural evolution of Vedism into Brahmanism.^ Words like 
 " Asura " and " Deva," both originally meaning sovereign 
 power, had of course a terrible as well as a friendly side ; 
 and in process of time each name would naturally enough 
 
 1 The word "Asura," which first meant "lord" in the highest sense, in Brahmanic 
 times received a bad meaning. 
 
40 ELEMENTS. 
 
 come to be appropriated to the one side or the other, ex- 
 clusively, without losing that common attribute of power 
 whose elements it had become necessary to distinguish. 
 We have only to suppose that the two branches of the 
 Aryan family, which were removed from each other in space 
 as well as in conditions of growth, assigned the parts thus 
 differently to explain the whole difference in the mean- 
 ings attached to these words "Asura" and "Deva," in the 
 Veda and the Avesta, respectively.^ Besides linguistic 
 oppositions, it is true that the two civilizations became 
 subsequently so unlike as to form a striking psychologi- 
 cal contrast. But the original resemblances, linguistic and 
 religious, are so numerous that they can be referred only 
 to the common Aryan stock, whose elements of belief be- 
 came divergent simply under the stress of different climatic 
 and social conditions. Terms expressive of the most im- 
 portant relations continued common to both systems : such 
 as designations of social dignity and national pride {Arya) ; 
 the priesthood (At/irava, Hotar) ; the prayer {^Mantra) ; 
 the personified offering lySoma, Haomd) ; the Supreme 
 God (^AJmra, the Indo-Iranian Asura, who is certainly the 
 ancient Vedic Varwid) ; the light considered as guardian 
 of truth (^Mithra, Mitray usually connected respectively 
 with AJnira and with Varwia)? Haug is of opinion that 
 the thirty-three Vedic deities correspond with the thirty- 
 three genii mentioned in the Avesta as surrounding the 
 sacrificial rite.^ And the Vedic ceremonials for the house- 
 hold (in the Grihya-s^tras) are strikingly parallel to those 
 in the Avesta of a similar class.* The primary personages 
 
 ' The word dasyu, employed in the Vedas to describe conquered enemies, and in the 
 kx^%X.iL{dagyu)\.a designate subjects of the nation, is a similar instance of the natural parti- 
 tion of a common meaning, which in this case is that of "subject." See Darmesteter's 
 Orntazd et Akriman, p. 270, a work in which the tlieory of a schism is fully disposed of. 
 The Avestau demon, Indra, is probably not the Vedic "lightning god," but a different 
 name, Aindra. See also Justi. 
 
 * See Lassen, i. 319-23. 3 Essays, etc., p. 276. 
 
 * Zeitschr. d. Deutsck. Morgenl. Geselhch., vii. 527. 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 4I 
 
 of the Avesta legend, — Yima, Thraetona, Keregagpa, — are 
 Vedic in name, have correspondent functions with their 
 Vedic analogues, and are fully shown by these relations 
 to have originated in the solar mythology of the ancestral 
 Aryan race. They were developed types of that conflict 
 of the sun with the cloud-serpent, whose continual repeti- 
 tion made so large a part of the imaginative interest of 
 those early tribes.^ The preservation of the common con- 
 ception and of the names associated with it in the myths 
 of both races, proves a continuity of development without 
 break or radical change, from the interpretation of Nature 
 as a physical or cosmical strife to the transfiguration of it 
 with moral and spiritual meaning. 
 
 Even that dualism of light and darkness which seems so 
 peculiarly Avestan, is characteristic also of the Vedas. It 
 involves nothing like hostility between the two systems. 
 It is, in fact, the response of Nature to the contrarieties in 
 human experience, as such, which belong to no special 
 race or religion. The oldest faiths rest on the adoration 
 of the light and the dread of the dark ; but it was not the 
 outward light and dark that brooded over the soul so 
 much as the antagonism felt within it, giving signifi- 
 cance to these symbols for the sense. This the Aryan 
 conceived the more intensely by reason of his peculiar 
 endowments of clear thought and energetic will, com- 
 paratively free from those violent emotions which in the 
 Semitic races tended to blur moral outlines and drive 
 blindly from one extreme of susceptibility to another. 
 The exclusively moral interpretation given by the Iranian 
 branch of this ethnic family to the great cosmical antago- 
 nism was in accordance with their special genius. But it 
 
 ^ See Darmesteter's fine exposition of this point (Ormazd ei Ahrimei7t). He traces all 
 the elements of Avestan mythology, certainly with great ingenuity, to the old Aryan myth of 
 the storm-cloud (pp. 96-216). Barth {Revue de PHisioire de Religion, i. 116) criticises this 
 theory as too narrow, showing the facility with whicli all expounding theories can be formed 
 as universal keys to mythology. So Spencer's Principles of Sociology, vol. i. .xxiv. 
 
42 ELEMENTS. 
 
 was not unrecognized by the Indian branch also. Not 
 only in the perpetually recurring myth of Indra's war with 
 the cloud-serpent Vritra, in which all moral as well as phy- 
 sical blessings were expected from the pure sunlight, but 
 more especially in Varuna and Mitra, the personified bonds 
 of truth and righteousness, typified in the same image, and 
 in the sleepless Adityas, immortal children of light, from 
 whom came every good and perfect gift, — in all these 
 symbols the conscience of the Vedic worshipper, his ideal 
 of holiness, were the passports to safety, the guard against 
 ill. But the dark power was not here emphasized to the 
 same extent as it is in the Avesta, and hardly rises to 
 the dignity of antagonist. The herdsmen of the Indus 
 felt the light and darkness mainly as the life and death of 
 their cattle, their wealth and poverty, their success and 
 failure in the strifes of rude clans. And as the mighty 
 flow of tropical rivers and the languors of a refulgent clime 
 drew them to a contemplative life, repressing self-assertion 
 and will, — not only the light and the dark, but all other 
 contrasts in experience floated and melted together for 
 the thinker into the one sense of infinite deity, while the 
 masses received their gospel from a slowly developing 
 priesthood. The heroic element also, which though by 
 no means lacking in Hindu life was yet but secondary 
 and left the religious interpretation of Nature to a higher 
 caste, could hardly be expected to work out an ethical 
 symbolism of her grand phenomena through resources 
 of its own. 
 
 But the Iranian saw, in the Titanic antithesis on which 
 the universe revolves, the life and death of character. Light 
 was truth and immortality; darkness was falsehood and 
 decay. The Avesta shows us a late stage of this concep- 
 tion, after the spaces and spheres had become transparent 
 to the fires of conscience, prompting to escape the bonds 
 of evil service into the liberty of obedience to the ideal. 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 43 
 
 How far this had entered the life of the people we may 
 not say; but in the oldest Gathas the evidences of an in- 
 tense moral earnestness are beyond question. The Dual- 
 ism of the Aryans was germinant. Mazdeism referred all 
 good and evil to positive principles warring for the posses- 
 sion of the universe. Its defiant protest against the lower 
 nature wrote itself out in what we should call a mystic 
 hieroglyph, were not the feeling too direct and realistic, all 
 over the heavens and earth ; so that they could tell but one 
 tale, — the war of truth against falsehood, rightful sover- 
 eignty against unrighteous revolt, heaven against hell ; and 
 the rolling days and nights were turned into the everlasting 
 Yea and Nay of the soul. The very order of the elements, 
 by which the contrasts are mutually sustained and com- 
 pleted, became the constant reflection of a positive rent in 
 the moral being of man. Here, in the opening of his con- 
 scious energies of will, we find the germ of those terrible 
 fictions of a gulf separating him from God on which later 
 theologies, especially Christian, have been founded, and 
 which no mediatorial scheme, in the view of enlightened 
 reason, is competent to span.^ 
 
 It is obvious that such consignment as the Avesta makes 
 of half the visible universe to malignant powers, and of the 
 whole to an internecine personal strife between the spirit 
 of good and the spirit of evil, must be of comparatively 
 late origin. Not only does its abstraction of principles 
 from phenomena imply this. That all these shades and 
 degrees of mutual dependence in the phenomena of light 
 and darkness which would naturally establish a certain 
 amount of cordiality between them for the simpler mind, 
 should be eff'aced in the general battle-array of all- 
 pervading and absolute oppositions, can only be the result 
 of long stages of struggle with natural obstacles. Severe 
 
 * See the Author's Indian p. 6. 
 
44 ELEMENTS. 
 
 conditions of social and physical being must have steadily- 
 resisted the fulfilment of ideal purpose, and kept it con- 
 scious of inward checks and contradictions, — as if some 
 opposing principle exerted a power of will equal to its 
 own, working through inexorable outward forces. To 
 have impregnated all Nature with this personal strife of 
 good and evil for the soul of man, testifies to a developed 
 moral consciousness, which could only have resulted from 
 permanent external conditions of resistance. These con- 
 ditions are not far to seek. 
 
 While the Indian branch of the Aryan family, from 
 causes already given, sank their native energy in over- 
 mastering social and religious systems that rivalled the 
 uniformity of Nature, the Iranians doubtless hovered for 
 awhile on the high, cool shelves of the Hindu Koh, whose 
 energizing climate is shown in the well-made, industrious, 
 and spirited Tajiks and Kafirs of modern time, — the true 
 representatives, in speech and physique, of the old Iranian 
 type.^ Thence they descended into the Bactrian highlands, 
 a rugged region of alternating heat and cold, where climatic 
 contrasts combined with Turanian nomadic tribes to make 
 their agricultural life a constant struggle with enemies both 
 physical and human, in which ceaseless vigilance was the 
 price of victory. On one side the mountain heights and 
 snows ; on the other the varieties of soil and scenery that 
 promised due reward to wise choice and determined will. 
 In these cradle-lands of Iranian energy the free Afghan 
 tribes of our day, however degenerated by native feuds 
 and foreign diplomacy, doubtless retain the marks of these 
 old Aryan conditions. Bold, vigorous clans, given to labor, 
 and passionately fond of personal freedom, they are ren- 
 dered contentious, and even inclined to treachery, by the 
 hard necessities of their life.^ The old Iranian tribes had 
 
 1 Hellwald's Russians in Central Asia, pp. 97, 101-2 ; and Hutton: Central Asia, p, 257. 
 * Spiegel : Eranische Alterthumskuitde, i. 311. 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 45 
 
 to pay their way by steady labor on a rugged soil. The 
 seasons made its results uncertain, and malice lurked in 
 summer drought and winter storm. The farmer must have 
 one hand free to fight off Turanian marauders; so that the 
 soldier had a social respect in Iran which he could never 
 reach in India. The Aryan will in India bent before gods ; 
 in Iran it bloomed into heroes. The primitive man, or 
 king, becomes in Hindu legend Yama, god of the future 
 world ; in Iran he is Yima, builder of paradise in the 
 present world : and this thoroughly human master yields 
 at last to the too powerful temptations of success, thereby 
 losing" his kingdom. The lie by which Yima fell, ever 
 afterwards the type of all sin for the Persian conscience, 
 was evidently man's infidelity to that implied contract with 
 the stern forces of Nature by which he was obliged to pur- 
 chase all he possessed by steady toil. The hero of Iranian 
 legend is ever the truth-teller, and his moral power must 
 be as great as his physical. This admiration of truth was 
 probably a measure of the difficulties in the way of main- 
 taining it; perhaps also of its rarity. We are disposed to 
 think that whatever of justice there may be in the reputa- 
 tion of the later Persians for insincerity, in contrast with 
 the constant exaltation of truth and reproof of falsehood 
 in the religious literature of the nation, may have had its 
 origin in the inexorable terms of a strife with Man and 
 Nature which was apt to prove too severe even for a never- 
 forgotten ideal. The strife of petty clans, the law of the 
 stronger, the precariousness of property, the caprice of 
 the chmate, the seeming tricks and lapses of Nature from 
 her promises, were all causes of demoralization ; while the 
 free spirit of the mountaineer, the personal energy of the 
 race, its habits of industry, and its aim to redeem Nature 
 to productive uses, stimulated honor and faith. These 
 ideals asserted themselves the more strongly for the peril 
 in which they stood, and the constant necessity for their 
 
46 ELEMENTS. 
 
 warning and rebuke. The purely heroic legends, which 
 in Iran take the place occupied in India by dreams of 
 spiritual absorption, even among Kshattriya chieftains of 
 the solar and lunar races, and by rivalries of saints with 
 deities in prayer and penance, are ample evidence of the 
 real and practical stress of this struggle with the condi- 
 tions of life. 
 
 The whole plateau of Iran was as suggestive of the war 
 of elements as it was provocative of human struggle to 
 master them. It is a world of broken, heaving strata, " a 
 Cyclopean workshop,"^ whose violent contrasts of fertility 
 and desolation are results of the latest convulsions of the 
 planet. Its sharp transitions of temperature and relief 
 might well have seemed pronounced hostilities of will, 
 bits of fixed or capricious purpose, living mutual contra- 
 dictions set face to face. Here was indeed a theatre for 
 the opening of the historic epos of the human will ! A 
 grand natural symbolism of moral conflict, of success and 
 failure, of duty and opportunity, girt by rewards and pen- 
 alties, prodigality and hopeless waste, was the unwritten 
 Bible of a strife between hostile principles for the mastery 
 of the world : enormous snowy ranges, half-extinct vol- 
 canoes, amidst zones of cold ; ^ salt deserts that still close 
 up around Persian towns, and border paradises of verdure 
 and flowers ; the mocking mirage, the moving sand-col- 
 umn ; hot blasts of summer and sweeping winter storms ; 
 luxuriant vales where the rose and nightingale reigned, 
 and barren, waterless reaches that defied culture and 
 awed the husbandman as with colossal hate ; insects vora- 
 cious and poisonous that swarmed in the coast-country to 
 the south,^ and the great Turanian wilderness on the north, 
 with its predatory tribes, — and the eternal march of sun 
 
 1 Gobineau: Les Perses, i. 152. 
 
 ^ As old a writer as Justin describes Parthia as possessed by extremes of heat and cold. 
 Geographical CJiaracter of Iran, MSS 1. 32. 
 
 3 Braun: Gemdlde der Mohammedanischen Welt, pp. 299-350. 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 47 
 
 and stars through the alternations of day and night, over it 
 all ! Here was indeed the fit arena for the hates of Ormuzd 
 and Ahriman ; for the war of Mithra, fertilizer of deserts, 
 against the Daevas of darkness and cold ; for the holy work 
 of Avesta-saints, the destruction of noxious creatures from 
 the benignant earth ! A land, too, for divine legends, 
 where heroism makes the saint. The sand-floods of Gobi 
 have covered hundreds of towns. ^ The volcanic rifts of 
 Daghestan are still a terror to the traveller.^ The quick- 
 sands of Khorassan swallow caravans in a moment.^ The 
 prodigious vegetation of Mazanderan, land of demonic and 
 magic lore for the Iranian imagination, impenetrable and 
 dank, still propagates disease, and drives the people in 
 summer to the highlands for safety.'^ One third of Seistan, 
 the home of legendary and epic heroes, is moving sand, 
 the rest a rich mould ; and the climate oscillates between 
 violent extremes.^ The undulating hills and rich plains 
 of Azerbijan tremble with subterranean fires, and the sand- 
 storm and naphtha-flame were in very truth pillars of cloud 
 and fire that moved " along the astonished lands." ^ The 
 fertile oasis of Balkh, " mother of cities," is girt with 
 waterless desert plains, where the fierce Scythian still 
 sweeps over the steppes upon the husbandmen and their 
 villages, like the hordes of demons whom Firdusi's heroes 
 had to fight. The paradise of Cabul is set amidst the 
 terrors of mountains that frown from a height of eleven 
 thousand feet, and above that rise for eight thousand 
 more, white with eternal frost; relaxing their awful brows 
 as they look down on the " joyousness of silver streams 
 and emerald gardens, glowing beneath a sapphire sky,"'^ 
 where the first glance of the sun has startled all seeming 
 sterility into instant splendor, like a creative word. In 
 
 I Huttnn: Central Asia, p. 348. 2 Von Thielmann : Journey in the Caticasus. 
 
 3 Markham's Persia, p. 334. •• Markliam's Persia, p. 346. 
 
 ^ Ferrier: Caravan yoiirneys in Persia, etc., p. 427. 
 
 6 See Lesley's Report on Coal (1862). ? Harlan's Agricultural Report, 1834. 
 
48 ELEMENTS. 
 
 fact, Persia properly has two climates, a warm and a cold, 
 — the narrow, dry, but palmy strip on the southern coast; 
 and the land of passes, to the centre and north, cut by 
 deep gorges and rising into rugged heights,^ wondrously 
 colored by the living light, or swept by arctic snows. 
 Travellers tell us that no tracks in the world are more 
 difficult than those between the great towns of Persia, 
 across Alpine passes, which only mules can traverse, even 
 after the many ages of civilization that have succeeded 
 each other in the land.^ As you approach Persia from 
 the west, you are met by a barrier ten thousand feet 
 high ; and through this mountain rampart the resolute 
 and persistent streams fail not to cut their way to the 
 Mesopotamian plains, turning at right angles to their 
 natural course between the limestone ridges, and making 
 for great rifts in the crystalline mass."^ In such wondrous 
 figure does Nature reflect the majestic opening of the his- 
 tory of personality, — another Avesta writ in mountains 
 and floods ; first real consciousness of the freedom to 
 choose and to achieve. 
 
 Such was the physical environment of the Iranian tribes ; 
 such the school of their imagination and conscience. How 
 profound was the effect on both, we may see in that im- 
 portant chapter of the Vendidad, which gives a list of the 
 evils created by Ahriman to infect the difTercnt regions of 
 Iran. Whether this curious passage enumerates, as has 
 been generally supposed, the successive migrations of the 
 Aryan tribes, or, as is more probable, the difTerent coun- 
 tries opened to Zoroastrian faith, it at all events describes 
 salient experiences of the people, and shows how closely 
 physical and moral elements were associated in their 
 
 * Kiepert: Lehrbuch der Alien Geographies p. 63. 
 " A. Arnold, in Contemporary Review, June, 187G. 
 8 Loftus: Travels iti C/ialdea, p. 310. 
 
THE MORAL SENSE. 49 
 
 minds. Some of the evils specified are obviously marks 
 of developed forms of religion, with positive rites. 
 
 "As the first best of regions, I, Ahuramazda, produced Airyana- 
 Vaejo, of good capacities. Thereupon, as opposed to it, Angro-main- 
 yush, the deadly, formed a mighty serpent (storm-cloud) and frost 
 (snow) from the Daevas : ten months of winter and two of summer, 
 and dire disasters from the snow. As the second best, I produced Gdu. 
 Thereupon Angro-mainyush formed a pestilence fatal to cattle. As 
 third, I produced Marv, the righteous ; then Angro-mainyush formed 
 war and pillage. As fourth, I produced fortunate Bdklidhi. with lofty 
 banner ; then Angro-mainyush formed insects and poisonous plants 
 ["hostile horsemen," — Harlez\. As fifth, yV/j-azy and Angro-main- 
 yush formed the curse of unbelief. As sixth, Haroyii (Herat), the 
 water-diffusing ; Angro-mainyush produced hail and poverty. As 
 seventh, Vaekereta j and Angro-mainyush produced the witch. As 
 eighth, Urvd, abounding in pastures ; Angro-mainyush, the curse of 
 devastation [" crimes," — Harlez\. As xi\'t\\h, Kluienta j Angro-main- 
 yush, the inexpiable deeds [of lust] against nature. As tenth, the 
 fortunate Haraqaiti ; Angro-mainyush, the wickedness of burying 
 the dead. As eleventh, Haetuntat, the brilliant; Angro-mainyush, 
 evil sorceries. As twelfth, Ragha, with three races ; Angro-main- 
 yush, the curse of over-scepticism. As thirteenth, Chakhra, the 
 strong ; Angro-mainyush, the evil deed of burning the dead. As 
 fourteenth, Varetta j Angro-mainyush, untimely periods of women 
 (ill-boding omens), and non-Aryan plagues (invasions ?). As fif- 
 teenth. Land of the Seven Rivers (India) ; Angro-mainyush, untimely 
 menstruations and irregular fevers. As sixteenth, those who dwell 
 without ramparts on the sea-coast ; Angro-mainyush, frost from the 
 Daevas." — Fargard, i. 
 
 The Zend commentary adds, " There are other fortunate 
 regions, valleys, hills, and plains." ^ 
 
 The length of this list of places and evils, its artificial 
 construction, the institutional nature of some of the ills 
 mentioned, and especially the resolution of all this experi- 
 ence into the dual action of principles embodied as persons, 
 indicate a comparatively late origin of the chapter. But its 
 
 ^ This translation is from Haug (abridged): Essays, etc., pp. 227-230. 
 
50 ELEMENTS. 
 
 testimony to the persistent action of the physical causes 
 above-mentioned is all the more impressive. 
 
 Such a process of abstraction and personification could 
 not be the product of an early stage of culture. It is more 
 intellectual than that monotheistic tendency which, both 
 in the Semite and the Aryan, is itself of later origin than 
 polytheism. Its rise in the Iranian tribes, under the con- 
 ditions now stated, must be explained by the intensity of 
 their imagination and will. It is highly improbable that 
 in the distinct and elaborate form in which we find this 
 conception of a world-strife in the Avcsta, and especially in 
 the earliest Gathas, it was very widely spread among those 
 tribes. The seat of its elaboration was probably the Bac- 
 trian, or eastern borders of Iran ; and the manner in which 
 the worshippers of Daevas, or false gods, are spoken of 
 points to a reaction on older and less spiritual beliefs. 
 The moral protest that informs it proves a great move- 
 ment of reformation, to which the name of Zoroaster was 
 attached, but whose roots were in powerful tendencies 
 fostered by the physical and social causes we have thus 
 far traced. 
 
DEVELOPMENT. 
 I. 
 
 AVESTAN DUALISM. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 
 
 /^F the long process by which this spiritual and moral 
 ^-^ dualism was wrought out, history gives little record. 
 When we first find the faith of Zoroaster, the old fire- 
 cultus has found a twofold personality, the substance of 
 which is this: Ahuramazda, — "the living creator,"^ " all- 
 wise Lord,"^ " source of light for the world, "^ " creator of 
 the stars by his inborn fire " (or " mingling glory with 
 the hghts"*), and "by his intellect, of the good crea- 
 tures, ruled by the inborn good mind ( Vo/m-mano'), Thou, 
 heavenly Mazda, makest them grow,"^ " giving with hands 
 full of help to the good," " by the warmth of his pure fire 
 strengthening the good things," ^ " creator of all good 
 through the tongue of the good mind," " father of all 
 rectitude" (or "purity"') in thought, word, and deed, 
 " appearing in best thought and rectitude," " giving per- 
 fection, immortality, wealth, and devotion,"^ — is opposed 
 at every point by Angro-mainyus, "the hurtful spirit,"^ or 
 "the evil mind " (^Akein-mano), "spirit of lies " or destruc- 
 tion, who poisons the mind with his impurity of thought, 
 word, and deed. The one creates all that works for the 
 good of man, physical and moral ; the other in pure moral 
 opposition, and at the same time, produces all evil thoughts 
 and things. TJms all things have their moral and physical 
 contraries in one. 
 
 1 Haug: Essays, etc., p. 302. 2 Spiegel: Avesta, Bd. iii., Einleitung, i. 
 
 3 ] rtf«a, xliii. 2; Haug. * FfTfwa, xxxi. 7 ; Spiegel. 
 
 6 Ibid., xxxi. 7 ; Haug. 6 Ibid., xliii. 4 ; Haug. 
 
 ■^ Ibid., xlvi. 2 ; Spiegel. 8 ibid., xlvii. i and 2 ; Haug. 
 
 ' Haug : Essays, etc., p. 304. 
 
54 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 These two spirits or principles are called primeval tzvins; 
 nor is there any distinction affirmed as to their origin. Good 
 and evil, right and wrong, exist before them in the nature 
 of things, it would seem ; since they are said to have 
 chosen between these, each his own part according to its 
 wisdom or its folly, its truth or falsehood.^ They simply 
 are here, stand before the soul, and it must choose between 
 them. It takes its part and pays its vows. These two 
 united have created the facts of " life, death, and how the 
 world shall be." ^ The increaser says to the destroyer, 
 " Neither our thoughts, doctrines, wills, vows, words, acts, 
 laws, nor our souls agree." ^ The soul of a man cannot 
 belong to both: "May we be such as help the renovation 
 of the world, and the wise spirits shall help us. This is to 
 be united with wisdom."'* " Ahuramazda hears the help- 
 ers of good. May he guide me by his perfect wisdom ! " 
 " May thy kingdom come ! O Ahura, give good to the 
 pure man who lives righteously."^ " So falls on the pow- 
 ers of falsehood {Drujo') annihilation. They who enlarge 
 the glory of the good pass to the abode of the good mind 
 (^Vo/i7Mnaiid) , of the wise {Mazda), of the righteous 
 {Asha)."'^ "Therefore perform the commandments which 
 Mazda has given to men ; for they are the perdition of the 
 wicked, but profit to the pure, the fountain of happiness."^ 
 " To the good the spirit of the earth tells the everlasting 
 laws given by thy intellect, which none can abolish " ^ (or 
 " deceive " ^). 
 
 Somehow by the very coming of good things come 
 their negations, fired- with living hate. " Ahriman bored 
 
 ^ Ya(na, xxx. 5; Spiegel and Harlez Haug translates "one created reality; the other, 
 non-reality,'''' by which term he cannot mean nothingness, but falsehood. 
 
 2 'Vafna, xxx. 3 and 4. 
 
 3 y'aftta, xliv. 2 Haug, who does not think the two essentially opposed, translates " do 
 not all these things follow us?" Va(na, xlv. 2. 
 
 * Krtf«a, xxx. 9 ; Haug, Harlez, Spiegel ^ y'afna, lii. 9. 
 
 * Vafna, xxx. 10; Spiegel. Haug says, "All perfect things are gathered there." 
 
 ' Vafua, xxx. 11. ^ Krtf«a, xliii. 6 ; Haug. ^ Harlez. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 
 
 55 
 
 through the earth," says the Bundehesh, " so that it was 
 rent by lies and strife, and at midday was dark as night." ^ 
 Powers of good, spiritual and holy, sometimes represented 
 as qualities, sometimes almost personal (on the verge of 
 becoming so at least, the idea hovering between these on 
 the wings of the imagination and feeling), aid Ahuramazda 
 and his good souls. Embattled hosts, forces of fraud, 
 falsehood, destruction {Daeva), war in the elements against 
 them, to be resisted by prayer, by vows, by abjurations of 
 their service, by praises of the best, and by good thoughts, 
 words, and deeds. Indispensable is industry, raising cattle 
 for food and wealth and progeny. " In Ahuramazda was 
 the earth-spirit {Armaiti), in him the spirit that formed 
 the cow when he made her paths that she might go from 
 the tiller of the soil to him who does not cultivate it." ^ 
 " Of these two, she prefers him who cultivates with care 
 filled by the good spirit. But he who does not till her, but 
 worships the Daevas, has no share in her good tidings."^ 
 Ahura protects the settled life of the (shepherd or) tiller. 
 " Listen not to the teachings of the wicked [robber tribes, 
 doubtless], for he gives to destruction house, village, dis- 
 trict, province; but kill them with the sword," or " drive 
 them away with strokes."'* "The wicked," says Zoroas- 
 ter, " protect those who oppose the holy and forbid the 
 cattle to roam through the lands ; whoever drives them 
 out [foes of agriculture] follows the ways of wisdom in 
 what concerns the herds." ^ 
 
 These passages certainly seem to refer to the herdsman's 
 life as opposed to that of the wild brigand, or nomad in the 
 f worst sense. Harlez does not think it means anything like 
 settled agricultural industry.^ So Spiegel. Haug's transla- 
 tions are free and bold, and cover fixed settlements. But 
 
 1 Bundehesh. Justi, chap. iii. 
 
 2 Ya(;na^ xxxi. 9; Haug : " to call upon him to till the soil." 
 
 3 Yacnn, xxxi. 10 ; Haug. < Ya(tia, xxxi. iS. 
 6 Yagna, xlv. ; Harlez. « Avesia, ii. 28. 
 
56 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 at all events it is industry that is enforced as against idle- 
 ness, amidst severe discouragements from foes human or 
 demoniac, or both. " Whoso cares for the cattle with 
 diligence is in the service of the good mind," ^ or " shall 
 inhabit the fields of the righteous and good " ^ (that is, 
 paradise). TJiese zvicked interlopers innst not be spared. 
 " I will remove from thy community disobedience and the 
 evil mind, the despising of relationship, the Druj nearest 
 the work [that is, idleness], the disdainer of obedience, the 
 bad measure of the fodder of the cattle."^ It is difficult 
 to understand who were the Daeva-worshippers who be- 
 longed to the army of Ahriman. In a confession of faith, 
 which is evidently of later origin than what has already 
 been quoted as Zoroastrian, they are spoken of as sorcer- 
 ers and robbers (of the earth, or cattle), and as doing 
 damage to the quarters, or clans, of the true worshippers.* 
 The Avesta gives no account of the origin of these unbe- 
 lieving tribes. They are taken as existing facts, known as 
 children of Ahriman by their unbelief in the pure law and 
 their corresponding habits, — just as the Zoroastrians were 
 known as of Ahura's creation by their creed and conduct. 
 It should seem that they were Ahriman's offset to the 
 humanity produced by the Good Principle. As the Daevas 
 are positively said to be propagators of lies and unbelief, 
 something of a speculative nature probably entered into 
 the grounds of strife. 
 
 But that the sense of moral reprobation had at least as 
 much to do with it as a difference of creed is evident from 
 the stress laid on personal character, and the root of the 
 dualism itself in thoroughly ethical contrasts. This ser- 
 vice of Ahura, this hate of Ahriman, is a living fire ; the 
 symbol has mounted to the heavens of conduct. And if 
 the infidel is hateful because he rejects the holy law, the 
 
 ^ J'iZfKfl, xxxiii. 3 ; Spiegel. ^ J'^^,;^, xxxiii. 3 ; Haug. 
 
 2 Ibid., xxxiii. 4 ; iSpiegel. * Ibid., xii. ; Haug. Were they Turanian raiders? 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 57 
 
 law itself is holy only because it commands things manly, 
 becoming, just, and helpful, — which things to hate and 
 persecute is infidelity. 
 
 Let it be noted, then, that whatever the original germs 
 in natural phenomena out of which this dualistic personi- 
 fication was evolved, its substance is the moral earnestness 
 of personal will. As we go on to those portions of the 
 Avesta which represent a later stage of it than Zoroaster's 
 Githas, we find the usual twofold evolution, of extensive 
 application on the one hand, and intensive confinement 
 on the other. The hosts of spiritual forces, good and 
 evil, multiply around the central ideas of righteousness 
 and iniquity ; while the saving warfare tends to run down 
 into the narrow ruts of petty ritualism. From the oldest 
 and simplest Gathas down to the latest Yashts must have 
 required nearly a thousand years of growth;^ and not only 
 do the details of religious personification accumulate to 
 the last,^ but the wearisome iteration of names and powers 
 in the prayers and praises of the ritual, and of symbolical 
 gestures and forms of purification, and the comminutia of 
 religious service upon all the various kinds of waters and 
 fires, come to surpass all other known rites, till the fire on 
 the altar has survived the spirit of the rite, and Zoroas- 
 trianism remains a monument of the self-destructiveness 
 of personal worship. But for a time this evolution of 
 Dualism was a form of living purpose, pressing into uni- 
 versal meaning, and inflaming all Nature with its fiery 
 spirit. The Aryan instinctively passed from the abstract 
 to the concrete, and the moral quality was sure to identify 
 itself with some material relation. In the Vendidad (or 
 law for expelling Daevas), still more in the Yashts (prayers 
 and praises with legends), the objects and qualities at first 
 blended in the substance of Ahura and his work became 
 
 1 1200-400 B.C. Haug : Essays, etc., 262-65. 
 
 * Spiegel : Er&n. Alterth. ii. and Avesta, Bd. iii., Einleitung, describes them all. 
 
58 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 positive persons, — " multiplications " of him ; ^ " benefi- 
 cent immortals ; " like the Vedic Aclityas. These were : 
 Vohu-mano (the good mind) ; Asha-vahista (best purity);^ 
 Khshathra-vairya, wealth-giver (desired kingdom ;)3 Ar- 
 maiti (spirit of earth, or obedience) ; " all of like mind, 
 speech, action, like their father and maker; each beholding 
 the soul of another, meditating the best life." ^ Add to 
 these, Haurvatat and Ameretat (health and immortality), 
 and we have, with Ahura himself, the sevenfold personal- 
 ity of righteousness, against which are drawn up Ahriman 
 and his six spirits of evil, — will against will. Later, these 
 powers that work good become distributed through the 
 material world as presiding genii over animals, healing 
 plants, remedies, metals, food, — all things from which 
 benefit was derived.^ The pure order of worship, em- 
 bodied in the sacrifice, as Haoma, becomes a beautiful 
 youth, who stands by Zoroaster in the flame to protect and 
 teach him.*^ And the very sentences of holy writ {^AJmna- 
 vairya) are no less than a divine being, forever victorious 
 (^Hofiovar). Then come hosts of Yazatas and Fravashis, 
 genii, and spirits of the just, or the higher selves of good 
 men, hovering over their conflict of good and evil, watchers 
 and guardians of the right, — for these ideal souls are all 
 on the side of good, and are invoked individually by the 
 names of good men, by the hundred and thousand at a 
 time, covering surely a long history, of which we know 
 no more ; "^ and against these, innumerable Daevas, Yatus, 
 Drujas, personified evil habits, diseases, monstrosities, or 
 other horror in the phenomena of Nature or the imagina- 
 tion of man.^ And the good spirits gather about the east- 
 ern mountain Alborz (Hara-berczaiii) , the world-centre, 
 
 1 Darmesteter: Ormazd et Ahrima7i,\>. i,T,. ^ Haug, 306. 
 
 3 Perfect king, Harlez. * Fravardin Yashi, 83, 84. 
 
 5 Darmesteter: Haurvetatet Ameretat. ^ Vafna, ix. 
 
 ' See Boissier: Religion Romnifie, ii. 131. Fravardin Yasht. 
 ' See Harlez : Avesta,\. 43. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 
 
 whence Mithra rises with his horses of the Dawn to 'give 
 light and safety to the world, where there is no night, nor 
 cold, nor heat.^ And the demons gather at Arezilra, the 
 world of darkness, and the gate of hell.^ 
 
 To these personal antagonisms correspond physical 
 ones, — happy cultivated lands of believers, loved of the 
 earth, and of Ahura, and helped by all useful creatures, 
 the cow, the cock, the dog, the ox, on one side ; and on 
 the other, rude wastes, noxious creatures, dark and deadly 
 forces, like storms and droughts, and scourges that can 
 and must be expelled from the holy earth. 
 
 " Who rejoices the earth, O Ahura ? — He who adorns it with <jrain 
 and grass, and fruit-trees ; who dries the moist lands, and waters the 
 dry places." 
 
 " Whoso cultivates barley, cultivates virtue. When the wheat ap- 
 pears, the demons hiss ; when sprouts come, they whine ; when the 
 stalks stand up, they cry ; and when the grain is in ear, they flee in 
 rage and despair." 
 
 " The earth must not lie untilled, but be ploughed, that she may 
 be no longer childless, but produce bulls for man, and be their beauti- 
 ful dwelling-place. Whoever tills her with both hands, to him she 
 bears fruit, as a lover brings a son to her beloved. Whoever tills her 
 not, to him she says, ' Thou shalt stand at another's gate begging food 
 of those who have much.' " ^ 
 
 To destroy noxious insects is the penance for sins. 
 Plant the wilderness, drain the marsh, turn streams into 
 the sands, raise flocks and herds, is the battle-cry of this 
 race that goes forth to possess the world and conquer evil 
 by force of productive work. The sun in his victorious 
 course, dispelling darkness and turning death to life, was 
 the eternal monitor to this human war. And the helpers 
 were ever at hand. 
 
 " Praise to thee, O holy Bull, who givest increase; praise to thee, 
 gift of the Creator for the pure who are yet unborn ! Rise, O Clouds, 
 
 ' Mihr- Yaski. 2 Vendi'dad, xix. 140-147. 
 
 3 Vendid&d, iii. 11-14; gg-ioS ; 79-95. 
 
60 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 come ! let the waters fall and spread abroad, thousand ten thousand- 
 fold waves, to destroy disease and death ! Rise, O Sun, with swift 
 steeds over Alborz, and illumine the creatures, on the path which 
 Ahura hath made ! The holy word says, ' I will consecrate thy birth 
 and growth, thy body and strength ; will make thee rich in children, 
 in milk and fatness, in the cattle which roam the fields. Rise, O 
 Moon, that boldest the germs of the herds ! ^ Rise, O splendid Stars 
 [or, hid in depths], ye who hold the seed of the rain." * 
 
 The stars fight in their courses against Ahriman. The 
 battle of the star Tistrya with the demon Apaosha (or the 
 drought), as two horses, in the great sea Vouru-kasha,^ is 
 the old storm-myth of the Vedas, expanded and endowed 
 with higher meaning. On the other hand, the later my- 
 thology, probably under Semitic influence, treats the seven 
 planets in the old Chaldean fashion, as evil powers warring 
 on the orderly constellations, which they seemed to invade 
 like roving nomads with their ever-varying aspects and 
 moods.^ The earth itself, as the soul of the primal Bull, 
 makes complaint to Ahuramazda that it is torn in pieces ; 
 to which Ahura replies that this (which means ploughing) 
 is for the sake of harvests for man; and Zarathustra is 
 bidden to teach this gospel.^ Perhaps the soul of the Bull 
 is not the earth, but the cattle themselves,^ the useful brute 
 creation, whose weal and woe are matters of profoundest 
 interest for this religion. From the seed of the slain Bull 
 (slain by Ahriman) come, in the later myth, the progeni- 
 tors of all animals and plants." Animals are pure or im- 
 pure, by rigid rule; but their relation to good and evil 
 is determined not so much by their moral as by their phy- 
 sical qualities ; often by some obscure or incidental asso- 
 ciation, or by transference from the old Aryan myth of 
 the elemental strife, — as in the case of the beaver, by the 
 
 1 The dews. * Vendidad, xxi. 
 
 3 The atmosphere (Dannesteter). * Mitiokkired, viii. i ; Bundehesh, v. 
 
 ^ Yacna-i xxix. ; Haug. The Bundehesh says it was comforted by being shown the 
 Ferouer of Zarathustra (chap. iv. ). 
 
 8 This is Roth's view ; the other is Haug's. 1 Bundehesh, chap. x. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 6 1 
 
 resemblance of his color to that of the light in the cloud ;^ 
 or of the ant, by that of the cloud to an ant-hill, covering 
 up a swarming life ; ^ or of serpent-like animals in general, 
 which inherit the bad name of the ancient cloud-serpent.'^ 
 Ardvi-gura, the strong healer, pours her waters for the re- 
 lief of men and heroes. Saviors from disease and death 
 are running streams and growing trees. The Bundehesh 
 makes a mighty rain from heaven destroy evil creatures 
 and Tistrya take the form of a white horse to remove the 
 poisonous smell of their dead bodies.* But whatever the 
 origin of these notions about certain classes of animals, 
 such is the force of religious association that most of these 
 impure creations are regarded by the later Parsis as really 
 injurious.^ As in other religions, traditional doctrine had 
 to be reconciled with facts by feats of accommodation. 
 The Bundehesh, which classes animals by external char- 
 acters, — mostly arbitrary and accidental ones, — makes 
 Ahura say to the falcon, who, as the lightning, is one of 
 his creation : " You do Ahriman's will rather than mine, 
 since you destroy so many smaller birds. But if I had 
 not made you, Ahriman would have done so, and made 
 you so great that no small bird could have lived." ^ 
 Ahriman made the peacock a harmless bird ; but it was 
 only to show that he could make a good thing. All grow- 
 ing things were for man's use. The great waters, which 
 the star Tistrya had to win from the evil demon by a ter- 
 rible struggle, held the seeds of all plants, which fall in the 
 rain upon the earth ; and ten thousand of them are for the 
 healing of as many diseases." Haoma, death-dispelling, 
 shall refresh the immortals. Every flower belongs to a 
 
 ^ Darmesteter : Ormazd et Ahriman, 2S1, — again the old storm-myth. 
 - See Rig- Veda, iv. ig, g. 
 
 3 Darmesteter ; Ormazd et Ahriman, 282-83. These explanations, however apparently 
 fanciful, have undoubtedly very strong foundations in mythological evolution. 
 
 ^ Bic!idehesh,\'\\. ^ Darmesteter: Ormazd et A hri>nau, 285. 
 
 •^ Darmesteter: Onnazd et Ahriman, 2S6 ; Bundehesh, x\v. 
 ' Bu?idehesh, {:<.. 
 
62 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 guardian god.-' Seventeen kinds of water were purified 
 by Zoroaster.^ Into the great sea there run a hundred 
 thousand golden conduits from the mountain at the eartli's 
 centre {Hara-berezaiti), and the earth is fertilized, in aid 
 of human toil, by streams and seas.^ " Slowly through 
 ages rises the great mountain to the everlasting Light," 
 and two thousand mountains spring from it to hold the 
 earth firm.^ 
 
 The paradise of the Avesta is the transfiguration of 
 labor. It is a region of nine hundred kingdoms, full of 
 cattle, beasts of burden, watch-dogs, and ruddy flames. 
 The weapons of Yima are a golden spear, for piercing 
 the earth ; also a golden plough (perhaps shovel) : with 
 these he brings forth its fruits, expanding it threefold.^ 
 Work was the true " purification," — live work of men on 
 Nature. The facts of the world were not to be dodged ; 
 the senses were not to be ignored. The material was not 
 put over against the spiritual as essentially evil. The good 
 Ahura had made good things, and good laws for expand- 
 ing their area by complying with their conditions and 
 paying their price. There stands the world, visible as the 
 fire that animates it, — our battle-ground to be redeemed 
 from physical evils and from the moral evil which poisons 
 and desolates it. This practical dualism was no dream, 
 but sober earnest. Even long slumber is a demon to be 
 spurned.^ 
 
 " The cock lifts up his voice with every splendid dawn, and cries : 
 'Arise, ye men! praise the Best! destroy the Daeva that would put 
 back the world into sleep! Long sleeping becomes you not. Turn 
 not away from the three best things, — right thoughts, riglit words, 
 right works ; turn from the opposite of these !' 'Arise, 'tis day,' says 
 one to his bedfellow ; ' who rises first, comes first to paradise. . . . 
 Bring fire, and be blest with herds and ofTspring." '' 
 
 ' Bundehesh, xxvii. ' Ibid , xxi. ^ Ibid, xiii. * Ibid., xii. 
 
 ^ Vendidad, ii ^ Vendidad, xi. 2^-36. ' Vendidad, xviii. 36-60. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 63 
 
 There shall be no asceticism ; no self-torture ; no self- 
 contempt; no excessive fasting nor violent grief ; nothing 
 that can enervate the soul and body by whose toil the 
 world shall be redeemed with the righteousness of man. 
 
 " 'T is an offence to the earth when the mourners for good people 
 go about covered with dirt and loudly lamenting." " He who does 
 not eat, has no strength to live according to right order, nor to 
 work."^ "To be helpless and enervated is the nature of a Druj 
 (evil demon)." ^ 
 
 Here was a religion that could makejieroes, but never a 
 monk. It poured out imprecations on all that caused sick- 
 ness or death. It erected its altars to medicine, and made 
 heahng the noblest art.^ Thrita, the hero, is honored 
 as the first physician, — as in the Vedas also, where he is, 
 as might be supposed from the difference of the races, a 
 saint, — and the Yazata Airyama is invoked to smite sick- 
 ness and death."* " We praise thee, O Earth, our dwelling- 
 place ; and thee, the lord thereof, Ahuramazda ! and may 
 there be in my dwelling, summer and winter, whatever 
 brings health and long life to cattle, to men, and the chil- 
 dren of the pure."^ It allowed no deed to be put off till 
 the morrow which could be done to-day. It is wholly in 
 the spirit of the earlier faith that the later Bundehesh says, 
 " Remember, in the resurrection the lost ones will say to 
 you, 'Why did you not teach me to do right, that so I 
 might have been saved?'" 
 
 The household and the clan (town) must be purified by 
 the same holy war. 
 
 ' Vendidad, 'm. -ib, ■ij ; 112-114. Harlaz's note on this seems unreasonable. 
 
 2 Vendidad, xviii. 72. 
 
 3 The art of healing is made the subject of curious provisions. The surgeon shall make trial 
 of his skill on the Daeva-worshipper first ; and if he fails three times on the true worshipper, he 
 shall not try again. His prices are fixed by law for men and beasts. Of the three kinds of 
 physicians, users of knives, herbs, and holy spells, they who use the last, the sacred formulas, 
 are the best. Veiididdd, vii. 94-120. 
 
 * Vendidad, xx. 11 ; xxii. E Yagna, xvii. 53-55. 
 
64 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 " May obstinacy be destroyed by obedience in this dwelling, dis- 
 cord by peace, avarice by generosity, vanity by wisdom, lies by truth- 
 fulness, that the Immortals may long bless it with good maintenance 
 and friendly help ! Never be the splendor extinguished of prosperity 
 or progeny, that we may shine with purity, and see thee, O Ahura, 
 attaining unto thee (' without end,' — Harlez).'''' " May there be given 
 to this clan purity, dominion, profit, majesty, splendor!" ' 
 
 Profoundest of all antagonisms was that of Life and 
 Death ; and in that centred the meaning of work. By his 
 whole nature the Iranian was a reformer of the actual 
 world, by creating whatever belonged to life, and destroy- 
 jing whatever belonged to death. (^ Life was the fire he 
 worshipped; living growth his ideal good, ^ No sin more 
 deadly than suicide.^ Never should die the flame of his 
 enthusiasm for consuming all morbific and fatal things, 
 for turning the dead clod into living organism, for sweep- 
 ing the lines of cultivation farther and farther through drift- 
 ing sands and wide salt plains and snowy wastes, — like 
 quickening Mithra, life-giving Haoma, and Ormuzd, source 
 of fire. Death he put far from him, his absolute negation: 
 no contact with its decay. Let the corpse be carried out, 
 away from living earth, from living streams, from the abodes 
 of the living, and committed to the open Dakhma, and the 
 solvent of the desert air; let him that has touched it be 
 impure, and the demon be expelled from member to mem- 
 ber till she leaves his body as a fly.^ For letting it remain, 
 even though but a dog's, in the ground two years, there is 
 no atonement forever.^ Not for fifty years does the earth 
 become pure again. Not till dust be turned to dust, does 
 the very Dakhma bear to be approached by the pure.^ 
 
 \ Death is the chief weapon of Ahriman, In the spirit of 
 the whole faith, the later myth tells us that he begins by slay- 
 ing the primeval creatures of Ahura, the man Gayomard 
 
 1 yafna,]\x. - Haug : Essays, elc, 313. ' VeK^iddd, v'm. 
 
 * Vendidad, iii. 135. 6 Vendidad, vii. 125, 127. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 65 
 
 and the Bull, who have lived in heavenly bliss six thousand 
 years, — a celestial union.^ Thus is opened the long world- 
 tragedy, by an act typical of the whole. But the seed of 
 Gayomard was purified by the sun, and the whole race of 
 man was born from it, to wage war against the murderer 
 till he should be utterly subdued.'^ Of a divine necessity, 
 life overswept death just as good conquered evil; for both 
 were one conception. " The soul of the righteous desires 
 immortality and the strength that overwhelms the wicked," ^ 
 or "attains to immortality, but that of the wicked has ever- 
 lasting punishment."^ According to his choice in this life, 
 the other holds him to the master to whom he belongs ; he 
 goes to the " house of hymns " {Gard-demdna) or the 
 "house of destruction" {Driyd-de3ndna),3iCvoss the "bridge 
 {Chinvai) of the judge " or " gatherer," where the ques- 
 tioning of his conscience concerning his life determines 
 whether there be width enough for him to pass, and the 
 angels or the demons take their own.^ The wicked spirits ■ 
 tremble when they breathe the perfume of the spirit of the 
 pure. " Vohu-mano rises from his golden throne in para- 
 dise, and asks. How, O pure One, hast thou come hither, 
 from the mortal to the immortal life?" 
 
 "Joyously go the pure souls to the golden throne of 
 Ahura and his immortal ones." ^ "For he who knows 
 purity, knows Ahura; to such he is father, brother, 
 friend." '' " Teach me to know thy laws, O Ahura, that I 
 may walk by the help of thy pure spirit, beholding and 
 communing with thee."^ Through one's own soul he is 
 justified or condemned. A fragment from one of the latest 
 writings of the faith (Minokhired), but fully in the spirit of 
 the earlier ones, describes the soul of the pure after death 
 as met on its way by a sweet wind from the mid-day, in 
 
 * Biindehesk, xv. ' Bundehesh, xv. 
 
 ^ Ya{;na, xliv. 7 ; Harlez ; Spiegel. * Yai^na, xlv. 7 ; Haug. 
 
 6 Vetididad, xix. 95, 96, 107. * Vendidad, xix. 108 ; 103, 104. 
 
 ' Yagtui, xliv. ; Haug, xlv. * Yag?ia, xxxiii., xxxiv. 
 
66 DEVELOPMENT, 
 
 which comes the law of his own character, as a beautiful 
 and stately maiden, who declares to him his own good 
 words, thoughts, and deeds, and their heavenly rewards, 
 and leads him to the divine ford, bestowed at Ahura's own 
 command ; and the soul of the wicked, met in like manner 
 by his own law, as an evil odor, which brings him to the 
 great darkness without beginning, and the poison from 
 Ahriman's hands. ^ How Christian dogma is here antici- 
 pated ! 
 
 It is noticeable also that the parallel with Christian Dual- 
 ism is carried out in the creation of an evil humanity by 
 Ahriman, in opposition to the good ; ^ only the curse is 
 not a doom of depravity on the whole race, but the crea- 
 tion of wicked portions outside of the law. The war of 
 elements in the old storm-cloud must transfuse the life of 
 mankind and of the race. This appears in epos and his- 
 tory as the strife of Iran with Turan. Such the unceasing 
 'Warfare for possession of the soul of man. 
 
 Immortality, in the Avesta, is not involved in trans- 
 migration like that of Brahmanism, nor in ^nrvdua, the 
 Buddhist's refuge from transmigration ; it docs not tend 
 to absorption in Ahura; it does not mingle man with the 
 brute, nor merge him with the god. It is distinctly and 
 completely personal; the beginning of that relation to the 
 future which has given Christianity its hold upon the Aryan 
 world. All the tragedy, all the poetry, which has gathered 
 around the conception of the individual as a boundless 
 possibility of good or evil, not in this life only, but for 
 everlasting existence, has its germ in the religion of Iran. 
 The Jews did not come out of their gloomy and shadowy 
 
 ' See Spiegel's K/iardai-Avesia, xxxvu'i. The Bimdehcsk says tlint at the judgment 
 " every one will see his own works, good or evil, as clear as white from black; each receives 
 the reward of his doings; the good weep for the bad, and the bad for themselves." (Chap, 
 xxxi ) Jiisti. 
 
 - Darinesteter : Ormazd et Ahrhnan, 287. Rut the later mythology derives all race?, in 
 all the seven quarters of the world, as well as all the strange amorphous kinds of men with 
 which imaguiation had peopled the wastes of Central Asia, from the seed of Gayomard. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 6/ 
 
 Shedl till Persia had taught them in the exile this idea of 
 the permanence of individual being ; nor did Christianity 
 add anything to the positiveness of this older faith in a 
 future existence. 
 
 Man's infinite worth divides the universe and draws all 
 living powers to the one or the other side. On him, their 
 central sum and purpose, the poles of creation turn. And 
 it is no mere strife of flesh and blood, but one of spirit 
 against spirit waged in the world of moral volition. Here 
 is a race that converts its sensualities into ideas that it 
 may master them in their essence. It is will and it is pur- 
 pose that infects or purifies the elements ; and nothing 
 shall move man's desire or dread in them but their reflex 
 of his own spiritual attractions to the light or to the dark. 
 He surrounded himself with legions of intensely active 
 wills, rank over rank, sphere beyond sphere, penetrating 
 and animating Nature, giving significance to its forces and 
 forms ; not moving in the play of harmony before the out- 
 ward eye, like the gods of the aesthetic Greek ; not in 
 mystical illusion, like the passive Hindu's, — but arrayed 
 against each other, like the warring hosts of Milton's Chris- 
 tian epic (which is but a modern Avesta). the rent republic 
 of the spiritual universe in arms. The Platonic to haifxo- 
 viov, the immeasurable ideal space through which the per- 
 fection of deity gradually descended into union with the 
 human, Avas here brimming and seething with the deadly 
 conflict of opposing wills. The Iranian Satan was no poor 
 monster with nostrils fire-breathing, with horns and hoofs 
 of beast ; no Lucifer fallen from heaven to play the rebel 
 against God, on a throne of desperation and under omni- 
 potent thunderbolts of doom, — but an invisible Presence, 
 armed with personal power equal to his hate of good, 
 infecting alike the outward and the inward worlds. The 
 righteous purpose only could resist and overcome him; 
 and its weapons were threefold. 
 
68 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 1. The spirit of Ahura: — 
 
 " O Father over the herds and over the just through his love of 
 justice, over the pure creation through its purity : Thou manifest 
 giver of good, whose greatness, goodness, and beauty we desire (to 
 augment 1) ! May he protect us, direct us, by [our] purity, activity, 
 liberaHty, and tenderness, with the fire of Ahura." - " Inquire of me, 
 with a right spirit, — of me, the Creator, who is ready to answer ; so 
 shall it be well with thee, and thou shalt attain to purity if thou seek- 
 est me." ^ 
 
 2. The word or law of Ahura {Mdthra-^penta): mean- 
 ing, first, the revelation through Zoroaster, probably the 
 five Gathas; then the three sacred formulas, especially 
 Ahuna-vairya embodying the praise of obedience and 
 purity, and succor to the poor, as the kingdom of God,* 
 which " was before the heavens or the earth, the righteous 
 or the unrighteous powers," — and of which the recitation 
 should, like the Hindu Gayatri, bring salvation; but the 
 taking away of any part of it, in utterance, banishment as 
 far from heaven as the world is wide :^ and as the priestly 
 ritualism increased, the efficacy of words to save became 
 extended to a host of formulas for invocation and service, 
 until the Persian Bible, in common with all Bibles, became 
 a missal of superstition ; and last, came the sacred author- 
 ity of spoken truth to punish and destroy lies. A word is 
 the first of sanctions which are called mithras ; and of a 
 word in this sense Mithra is the guardian and avenger. 
 " Break not a promise {iJiithra), neither with a just man, 
 nor an unbeliever," — for it is for the good and the bad 
 alike. He who lies to Mithra destroys the whole land ; 
 
 1 Harlez. 2 Vacnft, ]vu. 10-12; Spiegel. 
 
 ^ Vendidad, xviii. 18-20. All the powers, symbolical and spiritual, consecrated by the 
 traditional faith as belonging to Ahura, were instrumental in his aid. Thus the Yashts say 
 (xiii. 77) that Ahriman is driven back by Atar and Vohu-mano, or fire and good thought: as 
 in the Vedas by Indra and Prayer ; that Asha-zmhisia fire keeps guard over him in hell ; that 
 the multitudinous Ferouers watch the wall which Ahura has built around the holy mountain. 
 
 * Spiegel; Khordah-Avesta,'^di.m 3. ^ Kaf«n, xix. 12-15. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 69 
 
 slays as many as a hundred evil doers. ^ "For Mithra can- 
 not be deceived. Those who deal not false with him, he 
 brings out of all their trouble ; from the arms of liars he 
 takes away might, from their feet strength, from their eyes 
 sight, from their ears hearing. Mithra, who watches with 
 ten thousand eyes, all-knowing, may not be deceived." ^ 
 Haug has well said that " the angel RasJmu-razishta, the 
 rightest righteousness," whom the Yasht in his praise de- 
 scribes as present in all beings, places, and forms, repre- 
 sents the eternal laws of Nature and morality, like the 
 Themis of the Greeks.^ 
 
 3. Work: the sacred efficacy of labor; the praying, 
 with the hands fulfilling the prayer, — as real three thou- 
 sand years ago as to us to-day. The sweat of the brow 
 was no curse to these builders of their heaven out of the 
 conditions of the earth; no bitter fruit of a Fall, as with 
 the Hebrew. Praise and prayer went with it, — service 
 of God, redemption of man. Yima widened out the world, 
 filled his paradise with cattle, beasts of burden, busy, 
 happy men ; and the Earth answered his prayer and the 
 stroke of his spear, or plough, with her increase ; and 
 at command of Ahura, he drove his herds to milder 
 climes, and bore the seeds of plants, and with work of 
 hands and heel made a golden land, where harvests did 
 not fail, where was no wrangling, no beggary, nor false- 
 hood, poverty, nor sickness, nor ravenous creature of 
 Ahriman, — all before his bitter fall.* So Egypt ascribed 
 the plough to Osiris, the Greeks to Ceres, the Chinese to 
 mythic kings ; the Vedic Hindus to the Acvins, " sons of 
 the sky;" the Scythians thought it fell from heaven.^ It 
 was said that Hesiod, in his sentence, " the idle are ene- 
 mies of the gods," set a new law in place of the law of 
 Oriental society. But Iran disproves the assertion. To 
 
 1 Mihr-Yasht, i. ^ Mihr-Yasht^ 6. ^ Essays, etc., 205. 
 
 * Vendidad, ii. * Herod, iv. s- 
 
70 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 the Mazdean belongs the honor of having clearly and 
 practically conceived, through the moral and religious 
 earnestness of his grasp on the stern conditions of life, 
 that divine work depends on human,^ — not only on man's 
 hand-work, but the praise and prayer which, while fulfilling 
 the law, assures its growth. "Grow, O Haoma, through my 
 word."^ 
 
 The whole of this spiritual armor against evil is summed 
 up in one sentence, the ever-recurring formula, — " Right- 
 ness of thought, word, and deed ; " often called " purity,"^ 
 and constantly associated with forms and rites of purifi- 
 cation, which are minutely detailed for priest and people 
 in the Vendidad chapters, but by the very terms of the 
 formula clearly centring in inward aspiration and moral 
 endeavor. Neither thought, word, nor deed, alone suffices; 
 but their integrity in the will. " Turn not away from the 
 well-considered thought, the well-spoken word, the well- 
 done action." ^ " Call him the true fire-priest, who the 
 whole night seeks guidance from a righteous understand- 
 ing, fit for the bridge of judgment, and obtaining the life, 
 righteousness, and perfection of paradise [the best life]." 
 " Inquire, O Just One,, of me, who am the Creator most 
 bounteous and wise, and readiest to answer, — inquire, and 
 it shall be well with thee."^ For indeed "purity" is no 
 less than Ahuramazda himself, who is ahv^ays called the 
 " Pure One," and can be found only by the will that is at 
 one with his. A perpetual warfare to redeem to its ori- 
 ginal goodness as his creation what his moral and physi- 
 cal opposite had poisoned, involved prescribed methods 
 of procedure, based at first, there can be no doubt, on 
 
 ' See Tistrya and Fravardin Yashts ; Spiegel. 2 Ya(:na,-!i. 11. 
 
 3 A ska — commonly rendered "purity," which was applied at once to gods and men, and 
 which expressed at first the cosmic order, the religious norm and truth of things — became the 
 vague expression of moral order; and the Asliavan man became the good man, who fulfilled 
 the duties of the law, etc. Darmesteter : Ormazd et Ahrimatt, p. 18. 
 
 * Vendidad, xviii. 15-17, Haug; 41-42, Spiegel. 
 
 5 Ibid., xviii. 6, 7, Haug; 13-20, Spie;,e!. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 7 1 
 
 obvious relations to the object in view; and even as they 
 went on multiplying by mere prescription, they still repre- 
 sented at least the spirit and purpose of the Being through 
 them adored and served. They were very much concerned 
 in protecting against the contact of dead bodies. As the 
 fire of life was the very body of virtue, so death was ab- 
 horred and accursed as the symbol of evil. Diseases, and 
 all apparently abnormal physical conditions, or those which 
 were accompanied with startling or mysterious phenomena, 
 were also sources of impurity. It would be unprofitable to 
 trace the various kinds or grounds of purification, which 
 were multiplied by the immediate relation of religion to 
 the bodily condition of the physical world. But all puri- 
 fication has value only as it helps to purity in thought, 
 word, and deed. The very formula betrays the essence 
 of virtue to have been truth, earnestness, the hate of lies, 
 the love of the real. And this, which marks the whole 
 history of Iranian belief, from the oldest Gathas to the 
 latest Achsemenian inscription, is the natural expression 
 of that peculiar sense of dignity and worth in the person 
 which enters the historic field with Iranian Will. 
 
 The Avesta has no theory of the origin of evil other 
 than as a fact involved in that freedom of choice which 
 belongs to personality. Ahriman chooses falsehood before 
 truth. It is only in the latest Parsi books that he is repre- 
 sented as the result of doubts in the Supreme Mind, — a 
 notion which shows the persistence of the same theory. 
 Yima's fall from paradise is due to his fall from truth, 
 under temptation of Ahriman. Mashya and Mashyana, 
 the first man and woman, — according to the same later 
 mythology, mixed with Chaldean and Semitic traditions, 
 — at first seeing the truth, and aspiring to do like the 
 Yazatas, soon freely yield to the temptation of the Parsi 
 Satan to believe the lie that he was the creator. They fall 
 into delusions about eating and drinking, which deprave 
 
72 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 their bodies ; are driven to searching out inventions for 
 their support; lose their love, and dwell apart, and then 
 sacrifice to Daevas.^ Seven couples proceeding from them 
 give birth to different nations, while this Parsi Adam and 
 Eve become "like unto demons, and their souls will be in 
 hell " till the resurrection.^ Their descendants go back, 
 reversing their track, to the pure life which needs no 
 food ; and when Sosyosh, the redeemer, comes, all is re- 
 stored by the ordeal of fire.^ This very artificial story is 
 made up of foreign elements, and has obviously no philo- 
 sophical value. It is significant only as showing the per- 
 sistence of the old Iranian instinct to trace all human 
 experience to the free personality of man. 
 
 Here, then, is the earliest affirmation of human liberty 
 as the substance of a religion, — the first genuine escape 
 of man from the dominion of Fate, and introduction to the 
 law, life, and progress of individual and personal energy. 
 
 In this way the Iranian solved the problem of evil, stern 
 and inevitable then as now ; pointing out and entering the 
 path of solution which all religions that succeeded him 
 have followed. He did not ignore evil ; tried neither to 
 think it away by abstraction, nor to hide it under a heap 
 of interests and pursuits. He bravely met it in his own 
 will and in the Avorld ; pursued it through soul and sense, 
 to the very bounds of his thought, battling it down with 
 Ahuramazda's purity of thought and life, and Yima's 
 dagger of work. 
 
 Is it correct to define the Avesta-religion as Dualism? 
 That is, does it consciously affirm two equal forces, coeval 
 in being, and eternally at war? The language certainly 
 implies this, since the Good and the Evil principles are 
 even called " primeval twins " * in the oldest Gathas, 
 
 * Bundehesh, chap. xv. : Justi. ^ Ibid. 
 
 * Bundekesh, chap, xxxi.; Justi. * Va(na, xxx. 3. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 73 
 
 ascribed to Zoroaster himself. Nothing could be more 
 strongly stated than the intrinsic antagonism of these 
 powers.^ It is difficult to understand how Haug can 
 reconcile with the whole tenor of these writings his theory 
 that the older portions at least are purely monotheistic, in 
 the sense that the two " minds," good and evil, are both 
 included in the conception of Ahuramazda; and still 
 further, that the one represents the real, and the other the 
 unreal,^ — mere "destruction or lie" {DniJ), — these two 
 being "united in the one God" as his "two spirits." ^ The 
 passages which Haug translates in accordance with this 
 theory are differently rendered by Harlez, Spiegel, and 
 Bleeck, who also agree with each other.'* Zoroaster's 
 theology, in Haug's view, recognizes one Creator of light 
 and darkness, good and evil, like the Hebrew Jahveh;^ 
 and is to be distinguished from his philosophy of evil, 
 which was dualistic. The distinction is a rational one, 
 though in the absence of certainty whether the specific 
 Gathas on which it is based are rightly ascribed to Zoro- 
 aster, and in view of the disagreement of translators, it 
 is doubtful if we are yet justified in making it. As to 
 Jehovah, there is a distinction to be made. Hebrew and, 
 Iranian conceptions differ in respect of the focal distance 
 of deity, as seen by man, — a distance so great in the one 
 case (Hebrew), that the act of creating evil could not be 
 supposed to involve anything analogous to human respon- 
 sibility, especially responsibility to human reason or con- 
 science, on a positively unlimited will, which might at its 
 pleasure have transformed evil into good, or right into 
 wrong; a distance in the other case (Iranian) so imper- 
 ceptible, that to ascribe evil to God would be, first, to 
 make Him directly responsible for that which it was His 
 
 1 See, especially, Vendidad. ' Essays, etc., p. 303. 
 
 8 Yagtia, xix. 9. < ]'«(■««, xix. g ; xlv. 2 ; Haug. 
 
 * II. Samuel xii. 11 ; Isaiah xlv. 7 ; Haug: Essays, etc., p. 302. 
 
74 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 very life to break down and destroy, as His essential oppo- 
 site and innate foe; and next, to contradict that present 
 character by which alone He was known to man. For the 
 Hebrew, good and evil, moral and physical, could more 
 readily be ascribed to one creative source, because crea- 
 tion was, if not exactly production out of nothing, yet 
 approaching to it, since the thing created was somehow 
 external to the Creator; but for the Iranian, to whom 
 creation was simply a spiritual self-affirmation, distinctly 
 significant of its maker,^ good and evil were expressions 
 of positively antagonistic wills, and could hardly as such 
 be thrown back upon one and the same person. The 
 attempt to do so was made in later, probably Sassanian, 
 times (fifth century of Christianity), under Semitic influ- 
 ence, doubtless Babylonian,^ and is still adhered to by the 
 Parsis. Schemes prevailed deriving the world from Time, 
 Fate, Light, Space. Both Ormuzd and Ahriman were made 
 to spring from Zrvan-akarana, " Boundless Time," — a 
 substance sufficiently vague to be but semi-personal, if not 
 impersonal, — in hopes to reconcile the older Dualism with 
 a distincter demand for unity in the religious conception. 
 A partial basis for this idea was, according to Haug, in 
 the mistranslation of a passage in which it is said that 
 the weapons to smite Ahriman were "made /;/ boundless 
 time."^ But the history of the doctrine points to a deeper 
 meaning. And although Haug considers Dualism to have 
 been merely the philosophy, and monotheism the theology, 
 of the older Avesta, he cannot but think that a philosophy 
 which reconciles itself with monotheism by making a good 
 
 1 "The idea of creation is expressed in the Avesta by the root da, to institute, poser." 
 Darmesteter : Orinazd ei Ahriman, \). 23. 
 
 2 See Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, English edition, p. 230. So Spieiel : Siudien iiber 
 das Zend.ivesta [Zeitsckr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., v. 221). Rapp (in the same, xix. 
 S3). Rawlinson, who identifies Zrvan-akarana with Eel Ziru-banit of the Assyrian inscription 
 (Jour. Royal Asiatic Soc. xv. p. 245, note 2). Pictet : Les Origines Indo-Europeennes, ii. 717. 
 Carrfe : L'Ancien Orient, ii. p. 375. 
 
 2 Haug: Essays, etc., p. 24. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 75 
 
 spirit create a bad one, in such way that the latter becomes a 
 "twin spirit" witli itself, is a speculation on the question of 
 origin, which we should hardly expect to find in the early 
 stages of a religion, or even in a monotheistic reformer at 
 such a stage. It is only an advanced and refined mono- 
 theism that would abstract the positive quality of evil, espe- 
 cially moral evil, so completely as to subsume it under the 
 plans and methods of a perfect being, — for example, upon 
 ontological grounds, such as the necessity of imperfection 
 in all finite processes. Hebrew monotheism was by no 
 means consistent. Yet the Hebrews never ascribed human 
 passions and vices to Jahveh, except so far as they could 
 justify these to themselves by their nature or effects.^ 
 
 For myself, I do not think Zoroastrianism shows any 
 signs whatever of a philosophy of evil, any more than 
 Judaism. It is a moral and spiritual protest against evil ; 
 and it uses the phraseology of a twofold creation simply 
 to concentrate and antagonize the two sides of actual 
 experience, behind which it goes not. 
 
 I agree with Haug so far as this, that I do not find pure 
 Dualism in the religion of the Avesta; but still less do I 
 find one good God dividing himself through creation into 
 twin antagonistic principles. The Avesta affirms Ahura as 
 superior, and Ahriman as inferior. 
 
 I. There can be little doubt that Ahura is the Iranian 
 representative, even genealogically, of the old Aryan 
 Varuna,^ supreme Lord (Asura), and omniscient {vicva- 
 vedas) ordainer of the laws of the universe and of the 
 moral order, whose eyes behold every deed of man, and 
 whose bonds (or nooses) are the inevitable penalties of 
 
 1 In the earlier of the Jehovah passages referred to, the word " evil " is not used posi- 
 tively, but with reference to its quality as penalty inflicted by Jehovah, and therefore as good; 
 and even in the later, as the antithesis to "peace," it signifies trouble, which is here referred 
 to God, thus changing it into blessing, 
 
 ^ In Indo-European period, as Varana (Gr. Ouranos). See the author's India, chapter 
 on " The Hymns." 
 
^6 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 his sin.^ The same quahties and symbols belong to both ; 
 they are both associated with Mithra (the sun) ; both are 
 gods of fire, parents of the Atharvan, or personified sacri- 
 ficial flame; both "masters of all the gods." Each is 
 chief of a band of seven immortal powers, — the one Adi- 
 tyas, the other Amesha-^pentas. Varuna was the far depth 
 of space, the rounding heaven, the limits of thought and 
 power; and thus, and thus only, naturally associated with 
 the mystery of night, as well as with the orderly movement 
 of the heavenly bodies, which night in fact revealed. Now 
 it was easy for the Iranians to make this grandest of the 
 old Asuras their supreme Ahura; but it was scarcely 
 possible that they should have made him the source of 
 Ahriman, since it was precisely this absoluteness of his 
 moral being that determined them to choose him from 
 among all the old deities as their supreme God. He is 
 the unity of truth and light; he is light because truth. 
 And this is precisely the significance of Ahura. The 
 very essence of Ahriman, on the contrary, is the unity of 
 falsehood and darkness ; he is the one because the other. 
 It is true that Varuna was also associated with the dark- 
 ness of night ; true also that there were aspects in his laws 
 of penalty which fear might have turned into signs of 
 hate: the "nooses of Varuna" were doubtless the terror 
 of the wicked. His anger is indeed often spoken of."^ "As 
 the night sun," says a commentator, " he is even regarded 
 as the god of evil."^ But evil from Varuna could only 
 have been the penal suff"erings of the sinner, — the sign, not 
 of moral evil in the god himself, but of righteousness. He 
 is even called merciful to the sinner, and supplicated as 
 providential care.* There is nothing to hint of Ahrimanic 
 quality in Varuna's bonds of moral order, more than in his 
 grand paths in the nightly sky. 
 
 1 Rig-Veda,\\'\\. ^2,\\ ii. 27, lo ; vii. 86. See also Darmesteter : Orwrts^^^i" ^/;yiV«rt«, 42. 
 * See " Hymns to Varuna," in Langles' Bibliothique Orientale,'p 3S6. Rig-Veda,\n. 86. 
 s Langles' Bib. Orient., p. 126. * Pig-Veda, vii. 86. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 7/ 
 
 2. I observe that evil is everywhere conceived as infe- 
 rior and secondary ; and so far from being commanded to 
 worship it as he does good, the behever is to hate, spurn, 
 and destroy it. If it were a part of Ahura's own being, that 
 could not be. There is no such mysticism in Zoroaster as 
 to inculcate the service of one spirit of God by destroying 
 another spirit of God. Religion is ever the service of the 
 ideal. But it is idle to imagine that which a man hates 
 and fights through what he holds higher and nobler than 
 it, to be his ideal, — in other words, to be his God. He 
 may worship many gods, and some in fear of their power, 
 as the Vedic Aryans did ; but when he has gathered up 
 the forces of the universe into two principles, — the one in 
 accordance with his sense of duty and right, and his idea 
 of constructive good ; and the other utterly and absolutely 
 in opposition thereto, — and believes himself called to the 
 extirpation of the one and the exaltation and triumph of 
 the other, it is not easy to see how he can be said to 
 believe the two to be equal principles, or to worship the 
 one as well as the other, or the one as a modification or 
 expression of the other. That only which he holds high- 
 est and best, to which he gives his service, is his God. 
 
 Now the Avesta is wholly in accordance with this rule. 
 Ahura is the first to create. Ahriman creates, not inde- 
 pendently, but only in opposition to Ahura ; or, if Haug's 
 translation be correct, creates "non-reality" only.^ Ahura 
 makes good things, with calm, full consciousness of their 
 inherent goodness and of their good issue. Ahriman 
 makes evil things, under a delusion about their value, and 
 learns their evil destiny only when it comes upon them. 
 He is powerless when strongly opposed. His essential 
 weakness, disappointment, and despair get the better of 
 him on all momentous occasions, — as, for instance, the 
 birth of Zoroaster,^ when he flies with all his hosts to bury 
 
 ^ Yafna, xxx. 3, 4. 2 Vendiddd, xix. 147. 
 
78 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 himself in hell. He cannot prevent the good genii from 
 striking him and driving away his powers.^ Even in the 
 later writings, — in which the two powers are so equalized 
 that the one is throned in eternal light, the other in pri- 
 meval darkness, — Ahura, by superior knowledge, cheats 
 Ahriman into a truce for nine thousand years before their 
 war should begin, thereby securing to himself the victory, 
 anticipating him by creating the world of matter and man 
 between their two realms, as a bulwark, and then, repeat- 
 ing the formula, A/mna-vairya, so terrifies him at the 
 discovery of what he has conceded that he hides himself 
 for three thousand years.^ Down to the tenth century, 
 and the heresy of Anselm of Canterbury, tlie Christian 
 doctrine of the Atonement afhrmed a similar stretch of 
 cunning practised by Christ upon the Devil to deprive 
 him of his legitimate rights to the soul of man. Every- 
 thing in the Avesta points to nonentity as the end to 
 w'hich Zoroastrianism would pursue its evil principle.^ 
 Some later Persian sects conceive of its relation to the 
 good simply as that of the shadow to the light.'^ Cud- 
 worth^ quotes Plutarch and Theopompus to prove that 
 Ahriman was inferior and transient; and affirms that the 
 " Ditheists " (Magi) started with " a firm persuasion of the 
 essential goodness of the Deity," but to explain the evil 
 in the world had "to suppose another animalish principle,*^ 
 self-existent, or an evil god." Ahura loves the good, and 
 so creates it. But Ahriman exists only by negation, and 
 only creates evil because he hates the good, and wishes 
 
 * Spiegel: Eranische Alterthumskunde., ii. p. 123. Tahmurath binds and rides him in 
 form of a liorse {Yasht, xv 12 ; xix. 2g) He is powerless when sacrifice is made to the air 
 (Yasht, XV. 56). Zoroaster "reaches him against his will" [Yashty xvii. 19). 
 
 ' Bundehesk, chap. i. ; Justi. See also Spiegel : Avesta, iii. 1. lii. 
 
 8 Biineiehesh, chap. i. 
 
 * Hyde : Veienun Persanim . . . Religionis Historia, cap. xxii. 
 5 Intellectual System, \- 354, 379. 
 
 ^ Plutarch {Isis and Osiris, xlvi.) distinguishes Zoroaster from those who " make two 
 rival gods," as "calling the father God, the other Daemon." So Aristotle: Metaphysics, 
 xiii 4. 
 
AVEST.\N DUALISM. 79 
 
 to kill it ; and this, says the Bundehesh, is his eternal dark- 
 ness.-^ He is the god of negation. This anticipation of the 
 highest sense of civilization, which sees in moral evil, as 
 Goethe presents it in Mephistopheles, " the spirit that 
 denies," and in physical evil the dark force that waits to 
 be mastered by the light, shows how profoundly rooted in 
 human intuition is the reality of moral order, and the unity 
 of the moral and physical universe. Evil, then, is here not 
 God ; it is the Adversary. It is not original, but second- 
 ary. It follows up good with its opposite, and that in the 
 minutest details, but in a merely mechanical and imitative 
 way; not as representing the essential possibility of misuse 
 and disproportion in every power of good, but putting out 
 something else as its external antagonist over against it. 
 Its logic is futile and helpless, so far as it has any, and 
 amounts to mere contradiction, which is not only not dis- 
 cussion, but the most contemptible form of resistance ; and 
 though succeeding so far as to seduce men to their destruc- 
 tion, is doomed to essential failure, having no root in the 
 original purpose of things. Though without known be- 
 ginning, it must have an end. 
 
 The Avesta has, I repeat, no philosophy of evil. Ahri- 
 man is regarded as a mere purpose of destruction, without 
 even so much as the ulterior end of pleasure in destroying 
 others ; at least we find no emphasis laid on such motive, 
 so little reflective reason is there in this religion of pure 
 personal will. How evil originated, how it is related to 
 the universal good, how it could have power to resist 
 this, do not enter into the question. The moral conflict 
 has become all-absorbing, and speculative problems are 
 barred out, or postponed for the tremendous realities 
 of the conscience ; everything centres in the divided will, 
 and all that can be done is to expand the experience 
 to cosmical proportions, as a conflict of opposing wills. 
 
 1 Chap. i. 
 
8o DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 And these forces are dealt with simply as actual beings, 
 not as data for theogony or philosophy. But it is no 
 more possible that the two should have been regarded 
 as equal gods, than that the evil mind in the worshipper 
 should have seemed to him to have equal rights with the 
 good. There was but one Supreme God ; and the simple 
 point for us to consider as between them, is, which did 
 this religion honor and trust most, which does the law- 
 book pronounce fittest to be trusted, mightiest for good, 
 worthiest to be loved and pursued? The answer is: it 
 nowhere concedes to Ahriman one attribute of deity, and 
 nowhere refuses one to Ahura. Take for instance creative 
 power : — 
 
 " I ask of Thee, tell me the right, O Ahura ! How arose the best 
 (present) life ? The beneficent spirit, O righteous Mazda, is the 
 guardian to ward off every evil from man: the friend for all life 
 (worlds'). 
 
 " I ask of Thee, etc. Who was the father and creator of righteous- 
 ness in the beginning? Who established the sun and the stars in 
 their way ? Who causes the moon to wax and wane .'' These, with 
 what is known else, I desire to know. 
 
 " I ask of Thee, etc. Who upholds the earth and the skies that 
 they fall not ? Who made the waters and the trees ? Who is in the 
 winds and storms that they so swiftly run ? Who, O Mazda, has 
 created the good (spiritual'^) minded beings ? 
 
 " I ask of Thee, etc. Who created, perfect, the light and the dark ? 
 Who the sleep and the activity [watching] ? Who, morning, noon, 
 and night, and the laws which tell the priest his duties ? 
 
 " I ask of Thee, etc. Who has created the Bactrian home (devised 
 wisdom ^) with its properties (the kingdom *) ? Who fashioned, by 
 weaving motion, the excellent son out of the father ? (Who has ren- 
 dered the son dear to the father?^) (Created the love of the father to 
 the son ? ^) To know these things, I aj^proach thee, O Mazda, bounte- 
 ous giver of all good, creating all beings ! "^ 
 
 " Ahura : who created us, who formed us, who keeps us.* 
 
 1 Harlez. = Ibid. ^ Spiegel. * Ibid. 
 
 * Harlez. '' Spiegel. 
 
 ^ Yafna, xliv. ; liaug, xliii. ; Spiegel and Harlez. ^ Vapia, i. 4. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 8 1 
 
 " Ahura : for whose kingdom, power, and mighty works, we praise 
 him above all beings worthy to be adored, who dwell with our herds to 
 protect them. The Fravashis of the pure, we praise ; the best purity, 
 fairest, immortal, glorious, containing all that is good ; the good spirit, 
 the good kingdom, the good law, and the pure wisdom. ^ 
 
 " The clouds and mountains f all which the eye beholds through 
 the good mind; sun, stars, and morn which ushers in the day, — all 
 move to thy praise, O righteous Ahura ! And I with my mouth will 
 sing thy praise, in truth, as long as I have breath. Let the creator 
 aid with good mind all that increaseth right conduct, by his will."3 
 
 Zarathustra asked Ahuramazda : " Most munificent spirit, 
 which was the word that thou spakest to me, which was 
 before the heavens, before the water or earth, or animals, 
 or trees, or fire, or before the righteous, before the demons 
 and savage men (Daevas and impious men^), before the 
 whole material world? "^ 
 
 Then for absolute and pure trust, take the first of the 
 Gathas : for the all-embracing names of Ahuramazda, the 
 Ormazd-Yasht. Ahriman has no honor but the fear and 
 hate his purpose inspires. And though the earlier books 
 have left the issue of this great war to be inferred from this 
 spirit of zeal and victory which animates them, yet the 
 later writings have worked out the trium.ph of the good 
 principle in a very positive eschatology. The Gathas 
 hint this ; they give Ahuramazda the place of law-giver 
 and final judge over all men. " Creator of blessing for 
 the evil as well as the good, they only who, taught by his 
 spirit, increase the purity of men, will come to thy king- 
 dom,"^ or " shall be taught thy law."" " Rewarding words 
 and deeds, thou appointest evil to the wicked and blessing 
 to the good, through thy holiness, at the last end of the 
 creation."^ The Yashts, of later origin, describe the effect 
 of the coming of a prophet {CaosJiyanq) at the last day, " to 
 
 * !'«(■««, xxxvii. ; Spiegel and Harlez. ^ Luminaries ; Haug. 
 
 * Ya<;na. xlix.; Harlez. * Yn(;na, xix. ; Harlez. 
 
 8 Ibid., Haug. 6 Ibid., xlii. 4, 6; Spiegel. 
 
 7 Ibid., Harlez. 8 Jbid., 5 | Harlez. 
 
82 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 make life everlasting, incorruptible, full of vigor, when the 
 dead shall rise again, and imperishable righteousness fill 
 the world ; when the evil one (or ones) will disappear, and 
 his whole seed perish."^ Similar testimony to this victory 
 of Ahura, the destruction of Ahriman, and the resurrection 
 of the dead to immortality, is given by Plutarch^ and by 
 Theopompus^ (fourth century B.C.). To this end of the 
 struggle of three thousand years many prophets bring 
 their aid, from Zoroaster to Sosyosh, all of whom have 
 clear foreknowledge of the predestined triumph of good. 
 According to the Bundehesh, latest of all, fifteen of these 
 male saints and heroes, and as many female, will return 
 at this glorious day and share its wondrous regenerative 
 work. The purification by fire shall burn away all the 
 dross of evil, even in Ahriman and the Serpent ; hell shall 
 fall to dust and disappear, and its place be filled with 
 purity and bliss. The symbolic Bull and the mystic Haoma 
 of the old faith will also reappear as the consummation 
 of all sacrifice, bringing immortal life and becoming im- 
 mortal food for all, and Ahura dispense to men imperish- 
 able garments and eternal bliss.* 
 
 In all this the doctrine of bodily resurrection is of course 
 implied, and it seems quite superfluous to inquire after evi- 
 dences of its antiquity. The personality consisted of soul 
 and body, and their union was implied in all personal ex- 
 istence. So Jewish Rabbis taught : it is impossible for the 
 dead to " rise " out of graves except in bodies. In the 
 oldest Gathas the resurrection idea does not seem to have 
 been worked out, and the simple, immediate spiritual judg- 
 ment of the Chinvat bridge precludes the sleep in dust 
 which that idea involves after death.^ The Zamyad-Yasht 
 
 ' Zamyiid-i'asht, ii, 12. 2 /sis und Osiris. 
 
 3 See Haug: Essays, etc., p. S, 9. ■* Bimckhesh, xxxi.; Justi. 
 
 * The beautiful description of the spirit after death, led on the third night across the 
 Bridge and the Holy Mountain to the world of Ahura, — "the pure souls go contented, to 
 the golden thrones of Ahura," etc {Vendidad, xix. ), — shows that this belief continued on 
 to a later period. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 83 
 
 perhaps intimates a visible immortality on this earth. I 
 cannot but believe that the primitive Zoroastrian, like the 
 Vedic, faith gave the spirits of good men a body of fire, 
 while the wicked were invested with symbolical bodies of 
 darkness and decay. But so closely was soul related to 
 sense, and sense to life, in Iranian conceptions, that these 
 vague notions gradually gave way to that of a purely 
 physical resurrection; and this involved a delay of judg- 
 ment till the end of the world, when the dispersed atoms 
 could at once be miraculously restored to every personal 
 form.^ The Bundehesh enters into an argument, which 
 is substantially the model of the Christian, to show that 
 even this was possible to the omnipotence of Ahura- 
 mazda,^ and declares that each is to rise so unmistakable 
 that men will recognize each other's bodies and souls, 
 and ask with earnest anxiety concerning their conduct 
 since they met in life ; the very period of life in which 
 each died shall appear in him ; the child's dust rise as 
 youth, the man's as a man ; and in the heavenly state, where 
 no more children shall be born, each family shall keep its 
 earthly form intact. It is difficult to believe that this final 
 resurrection doctrine had much practical influence, even if 
 it existed, during the period of the Avestan compositions, 
 when there seems to have been a constant sense of the 
 immediate presence, at least, of the Fravashis, or spirits of 
 the pure, as of those who had already passed the Chinvat 
 bridge into their reward.^ In Christianity the same vague 
 inconsistency of sentiment prevails concerning the state of 
 souls after death ; on the one hand, they are thought of 
 as conscious, if not present, and as already passed to eter- 
 nal judgment ; and on the other, as awaiting the last trump 
 to rise from the dead at the end of the world. The con- 
 
 1 Rabbins also same. - Bundehesh, xxx. i. ; Justi. 
 
 ^ Frtf««, xxiv. 14 ; xxvi. 34. But in the Bundehesh, Ahura creates the Fravashis before 
 mankind ; chap. ii. 
 
84 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 fusion of blind instincts concerning a state as yet unknown 
 of course explains this inconsistency in both religions; but 
 in both the determination of every man's future throughout 
 all time is held to belong to the just and righteous God, 
 and resurrection and judgment alike to prove His triumph 
 over the powers of evil. 
 
 A conflict like this could end only in the utter destruc- 
 tion, or the perfect conversion, of the powers of evil. Both 
 these issues are asserted in the Zoroastrian writings, the 
 latter only in the latest. The earlier are too much absorbed 
 in the internecine battle itself to dogmatize as to the way 
 in which the triumph should be used, or to speculate as to 
 the conditions absolutely requisite to the permanent sup- 
 pression of evil-will. Heaven for the good, hell for the 
 wicked ; the corporeal world of Nature and man between 
 these two, and the battle raging for the mastery of every 
 soul, — this was all. Both these spheres are said to be 
 without beginning, and immortality is affirmed of heaven; 
 while hell is nowhere said to be without end.^ Had evil 
 been regarded as a principle only, or as simply a fact, there 
 would have been room for a philosophy of its origin, func- 
 tion, and end;^ but as it was gathered up into a personal 
 will, actuated by personal hate, and antagonized by equal 
 
 1 The only passage in all the older Zend-Avesta which seems to assert eternal punishment 
 is one where it is said of the idolatrous priests that they are so hardened that they ought to 
 avoid the Bridge of Judgment, " to remain forever in the dwelling-place of destruction." 
 (Vafna, xlvi. ii ; Haug.) This can hardly serve to prove the dogma of eternal punishment 
 in the absence of every other proof. Yet Carre so thinks (L''Ancien Orient, ii. 326). 
 
 ^ According to the Bundehesh, the interpretation of which is extremely uncertain, the good 
 and evil shall at last be raised with their bodies, to pass for three days (after separation accord- 
 ing to their characters) through liquid fire of the molten earth, and so be purified ; the end 
 whereof, either by the destruction of the very bad, at all events by a sifting process, or rather 
 distilling, by which all evil should be worked off, shall be a pure world, without stain of evil 
 mind. That this can mean that the worst people, those who have been already in Duzakh 
 (hell) for ages, should in three days become perfectly pure, is incredible: the annihilation 
 interpretation is more probable. And it is equally improbable that all should come into the 
 same bliss, since a new and more perfect heaven is said to be created for the good. (See 
 Bundehesk, xx.xi. ; Justi.) The Dabisiau gives traditions of Zoroaster from the Mobads, one 
 of which is that he said, " God has commanded me, ' Say thou to mankind that they ;ire not 
 to abide in hell forever; when their sins are expiated, they are delivered out of it.'" — 
 Dabistan, i. 363. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 
 
 85 
 
 hate on the part of another will, the question was simply- 
 one of victory, and the interest purely personal and 
 instant. And so it continued after the religion became 
 accepted and instituted, and leisure was afforded for con- 
 ceiving it as a whole, with all the final consequences it 
 involved.^ 
 
 The Avesta asks not, What is the meaning of evil ; what 
 ends, spiritual and progressive, it is bound to serve ; what 
 its future in human and finite conditions ; what its justifi- 
 cation as an element of growth? No such questions can 
 enter this purely personal system ; but rather. What shall 
 finally be done with these wicked wills, and with this pri- 
 mal wicked will when conquered, to insure their total sup- 
 pression? Zoroastrianism, then, could not be satisfied with 
 eternal punishments ; it would purify the whole universe, 
 — and such a hell would immortalize impurity. Zoroaster 
 would utterly suppress evil, — and such a hell would be 
 an endless demonstration that the evil-will stood fast, 
 even in chains. It was too much in earnest not to wish 
 the terrible strife to end. There were only two ways to 
 end it : either to annihilate the hostile will, or to convert 
 it. The interpreters of the Bundehesh are divided on the 
 question, whether Ahriman would be destroyed by the 
 purifying fire of judgment, or brought to sing the praises 
 of Ahura with all his hosts.^ 
 
 Both these solutions are maintained in the modern Parsi 
 church ; and both seem to have been developed naturally 
 enough out of the genius of the Zoroastrian faith. They 
 certainly were not added to it through contact with the 
 
 1 In the Hindu pantheistic view of evil, it was natural that the early symbols sliould grad- 
 ually change their meanings, even passing into opposite ones. They floated in the haze of 
 metamorphosis, where deity became all things in turn, and all things deity. Thus the serpent, 
 originally the cloud-demon, slain by the god of lightning, became in India the coiled bed of 
 the preserving God. But no symbol of evil became in Iran a type of good ; the moral empha- 
 sis was too strong. So the conflict of the gods unknown to the Veda is a great feature of the 
 eschatolog>' of the Avesta, especially the Bunde/tesh. as also of the Edda. 
 
 * See Bundehesh, chap, xxxi., translated in Schwenck, Mythologie der Perses, 324-25. 
 
86 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 religions of Media and Babylonia.^ The old Accadian 
 writings contain no working out of the problem of evil 
 either by annihilation or conversion. The strife was against 
 cosmical demons out of the abyss, who disturbed the 
 order of the world, and brought disease, calamity, death, 
 and unnatural or insane conduct upon men :^ and these 
 were to be repelled by conjuration and spell ; but their 
 relation to the moral being was external, and the need was, 
 not of their extirpation, but their defeat. The ethical in- 
 terest of the Iranian offset his horror of physical death 
 by the heaven prepared beyond it for the good, but the 
 Accadian sent both good and evil to a sheol of "dark- 
 ness, where there is no food but dust ; " and though there 
 were seven (astronomical) zones in this unblcst land of 
 shadows, these had no bearing on the final solution of the 
 war of evil against good. To a faith so entirely absorbed 
 in the present life as the Accadian, a resurrection of the 
 dead to judgment, and a consequent purification of the 
 spiritual universe, could have no meaning. The epic of 
 Izdubar contains only one hint looking this way, — a foun- 
 tain of life in the depths of the world of shades, described 
 as affording power to Ishtar to return from these gloomy 
 realms to the light of day. 
 
 Neither in a spiritual nor ethical point of view does the 
 Accadian religion, nor any of its combinations, compare 
 with the Zoroastrian. Good and evil are not distinctly 
 separated, and are often represented by the same deity .^ 
 The Assyrio-Babylonians merely inherited Accadian gods, 
 and the Semitic element brought by Assyria added nothing 
 to the development of these questions. Asshur and Bel 
 and Nebo and Merodach exercised no such function in 
 
 1 The passages in Anquetil's translations from the Yai^na which teach this doctrine are 
 mistranslated. They are quoted in Nicolas : Doctrines Religieuses des Jui/s, p. 302. 
 
 2 See Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, Eng. ed , pp. 29, 30. 
 
 3 See Schrader: H'dllcnf. der I star; and Records of The Past, vol. i. p. 139; and in 
 the Allgemcine Zeitung, Augsburg, June 19, 1S72. Also Lenormant, p. 165-66. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 8/ 
 
 regard to evil as Ahuramazda; represented no moral con- 
 flict, nor looked to any final dealing with the woes and sins 
 of the world. Sensual excess, which Ahura put far from 
 him, was in fact involved in the Semitic conception of 
 deity itself; and Baal, Moloch, Jahveh, as gods of fire, 
 were worshipped by rites, even of human sacrifice, which 
 would have been incongruous with the spiritual meaning 
 of that element in the Iranian faith, and made it unfit 
 to serve as a purification of the world from sin. So 
 that neither Accadian nor Semitic beliefs could have sug- 
 gested a final disposal of evil through purifying fire, which 
 should destroy the wicked seeds or convert their malignant 
 will. On the other hand, this eschatology was a natural 
 development of Zoroastrian beliefs, even as presented in 
 the Gathas. And to their historical influence must be 
 ascribed its prominence, not only in the Bundehesh of the 
 Sassanian epoch, but in Hebrew literature subsequent to 
 the exile ; as in the Book of Daniel, the apocalyptic Enoch 
 and Ezra, and in the early Christian belief concerning the 
 future life, the end of the world, and the last judgment.^ 
 Eternity of punishment belongs to a very different class 
 of ideas, since it is as far as possible from recognizing the 
 final purification of the universe from evil, or the final 
 supremacy of good, although of course intended to do this 
 in some degree. It is therefore thoroughly anti-Iranian, 
 and its promulgation in Christianity and later Judaism must 
 be ascribed to the peculiar intensity of those personal feel- 
 ings in which the great moral reaction of Christianity origi- 
 nated, and especially to the Messianic apocalyptics of the 
 two centuries preceding the birth of Jesus, — prominently, 
 the Book of Daniel.^ 
 
 ^ The doctrine of tlie resurrection of the body was penetrating Palestine in the time of 
 Christ, and that of the iinmortality of the soul, derived from Platonism, spreading in Alexan- 
 dria. But these two excluded each other. Nicolas : Doctrines Religietises des Juifs, p. 316. 
 
 ^ See, for Hebrew ideas of hell-punishment, Sirach, vii. 17; of immortality in post-exilian 
 period, IVisdatn of Solomoii, ii. 23; Josephus, B. J. ii. 8, 11: of resurrection, Ecclesiastes 
 
88 DEVELOPMENT, 
 
 But the whole tenor of the Avesta impHes, — and this is 
 the grand thing about it, — the victory of good over evil, 
 of right over wrong, the sovereignty of the law proclaimed 
 in the conscience. As Ahuraniazda was first, so He shall 
 be last. Man, his creation, born radiant, with eyes look- 
 ing upward, shall soar above his evil stars ; and this, not 
 by the destruction of his personal will, but by the natural 
 and noble exercise of it. The Bundehesh says that " with 
 consciousness and the Fravashi [ideal soul] Ahura brought 
 love and wisdom unto men." " Which will ye choose, O 
 ye souls of men, about to take earthly form, — to be made 
 for warring against evil, that ye may afterwards become 
 immortal, or to be protected against evil from the begin- 
 ning?" "And by their wisdom they choose to be made 
 as creatures, to strive for immortal life." ^ This worship- 
 per of light could see all things resolving themselves into 
 light at last. In the Gathas, his living trust in being on 
 the side of Ahura, the just and pure one, is his all-suffic- 
 ing confidence, while the fate of the evil is simply to be 
 conquered at last. In the later Ya^nas, Vendidad, Yashts, 
 and the Bundehesh, there gradually grew up a historic or 
 rather prophetic construction of the process by which the 
 end should be reached. The world-history is divided into 
 four periods of three thousand years each, — during the 
 first two of which Ahura creates freely his good world ; 
 during the third the strife begins and deepens ; and during 
 the fourth, opening with Zoroaster, three prophets appear 
 at intervals of a thousand years, the last of whom, Sosyosh, 
 brings the resurrection of bodies, judgment of souls, and 
 destruction of evil, — according to the Bundehesh, by puri- 
 
 xlvi. 12; xlix. 10; II Maccabees, vii.,xii. 44: of last judgment, Rabbins: of resurrection of 
 body, Rabbins. Duscliak: Die biblisch-tahnud. Glaubenslehre ^ etc., pp. 181, 182. The ex- 
 treme resemblance of Persian escliatology with that of Daniel is traced in Nicolas: Doctrines 
 Religieuses des Jiiifs, p. 303. Resurrection, with Daniel and Maccabees, is partial only, how- 
 ever. See also Duschak : Die biblisch-tahitud. Glaubenslehre, etc., p. 173- 
 1 Bundehesh, ii.; Justi. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 89 
 
 fication of all good and evil, through fire, into capacity for 
 blessedness. For this end the corporeal world is brought 
 into being, that the good principle might, by mastering 
 the intervening space between his own realm and the op- 
 posing one, absorb the latter, and make the universe one 
 in himself.^ 
 
 Lenormant- thinks it was "from rejecting the notion of 
 original sin, and substituting the doctrine of emanation for 
 that of creation, and fatalism for freedom, that most of 
 the peoples of pagan [Aryan] antiquity were led to the 
 melancholy theory of the Four Ages, as we find it in the 
 sacred books of India and the poems of Hesiod ;" whereas 
 the Bible, regarding man as free and not subject to fate, 
 does not contain the idea of world-decadence. But there 
 seems to be as much practical fatalism in the Hebrew con- 
 ception of a tendency to sin in human nature — capable 
 of causing man first to be expelled from Paradise, then to 
 be almost extirpated by a deluge, and through all ages 
 to be scourged by a divine wrath, from which even the 
 chosen people are not free, and from which only a divine 
 Messiah could deliver him — as in that pantheistic evolu- 
 tionism of the Aryan, which if resulting in a more definite 
 idea of a cycle of degeneracy, yet involved also the further 
 consequence of a renewal of good beyond the destruction 
 of an evil world. Surely, the God who creates man after 
 His own pleasure is as truly a power of fate as the law 
 that makes his history a decadence, and its end a disso- 
 lution of the evil it has caused. In fact the Hebrews, as 
 well as the Hindus and Persians and Greeks, were led to 
 the "melancholy" theory of world-destruction, — certainly 
 not less melancholy because it was to be the consequence 
 
 * Spiegel: Eran- Alterih. ii. 142. The Hebrews did not reach this till very late; and 
 Paul's description of the triumpli of Christianity at the last juflgment, resolving all evil into 
 obedience to God, is a carrj'ing out of it ( i Cor. xv. 24). The doctnne of final restitution of 
 the world gradually penetrated Jewish beliefs, and the later Cabalistic writiugs resemble in 
 this the Zoroastrian. Nicolas : Doctrines Kehgicuses des Jui/s, p- 306. 
 
 2 Contemporary Review for September, 1879. 
 
90 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 of original sin, than if it had been the sequel of gold, silver, 
 brass, and iron periods. In fact, the Hebrews believed 
 in such penal destruction, and transmitted the idea to 
 Christianity, which made it a fundamental motive. As 
 for freedom, no race ever abased itself before a personal 
 God more than the older Hebrews ; who believed that 
 their jealous Jahveh punished curiosity by expulsion from 
 Eden, and aspiration to social progress with confusion of 
 tongues. They were more oppressed by that sense of 
 separation from God which came from the emphasis laid 
 on their freedom to sin, than the Aryan was by the sense 
 of an emanation, even by fatality, which did not break the 
 unity of Being. Semite, as well as Ar}'an, had his myth 
 of a Golden Age and of man's fall from it, thus confessing 
 the power of historic decadence and that element of fate 
 which cannot be ignored. And of these the Aryan has 
 been the prophet of progress : this was the meaning of 
 destiny for him, and his doctrine of lost things; and his 
 evolution is the philosophy of hope. The Persian was the 
 very apostle of earnest ethical endeavor. He also had his 
 myth of " original sin," of a Fall (of Yima, king of Para- 
 dise) through a lie ; and Lenormant himself finds in the 
 serpent created by Ahriman to poison his Eden and effect 
 his ruin an echo of the same tradition on which the Bible 
 story rests. This writer, even while making use of these re- 
 semblances to aggrandize Bible authority, is candid enough 
 to confess that the Zoroastrian scriptures gave moral value 
 to the older Chaldeo-Semitic conceptions of the Fall.^ 
 
 Now, we have said that this religion does not deal in the 
 metaphysics of evil ; it dwells simply on the practical 
 antagonism of right and wrong, and of the things which 
 make for the one and for the other. It was not introver- 
 sive enough to find the root of evil, as later systems have, 
 in human nature. It was too much absorbed, as it seems 
 
 * Contemporary Review, September, 1879. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 9 1 
 
 to me, in the hatred of it to ascribe it to the perfect God. 
 It did not undertake to justify its existence under a wise 
 Providence, as discipHne, or culture. It does not anywhere 
 say positively, "This struggle shall develop moral strength 
 and spiritual growth." But did it not practically affirm 
 this? Do men make it the life of their religion to war 
 against wrong, without discovering that this resistance is 
 after all to draw out and educate their v.ills by the pursuit 
 of the ideal? 
 
 There is no failure here to recognize the strength of the 
 foe; the cup of evil is drunk to the dregs. The tragedy 
 of sin and penalty, the martyrdom of heroism and love, 
 the stern conditions of victory, the inexorable mathematics 
 of moral and spiritual cost, are acknowledged in the whole 
 structure of the religion, in every detail of the epos and 
 dogma of this mighty strife for the possession of the soul 
 of man. Never docs the power of Ahriman fail to prove 
 itself in the bodily life of the righteous. Never does the 
 weakness of Ahriman fail to be made manifest in the moral 
 gain and growth for the whole creation, that follow on his 
 terrible but impotent revenge. The myth is at pains to 
 foreshow this issue by infusing into his whole conduct of 
 the strife an element of folly and fear. Through this 
 earlier " holy war " there runs the Iranian instinct to 
 overpoise the past with the future, experience with pro- 
 phecy ; to make failure and loss the stepping stones to 
 progress. Darmesteter, who with marvellous ingenuity 
 has traced the whole Avestan mythology as a process of 
 evolution from the strife of the elements, has hinted this 
 higher spiritual meaning in a striking summary, which 
 deserves to be quoted : — 
 
 " Thirty years Ahriman is powerless against the Bull ; ^ three 
 thousand years he trembles before Gayomard ; ^ thirty years he gnaws 
 
 ' The Bull is Ahura's good creation, slain by Ahriman, from whose seed spring fertility 
 and the human race. 2 The first man, slain by Ahriman. 
 
92 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 the bit under the spur of Tahmurath ;i but at last all tliese perish. 
 The stone and word of Zoroaster plunge him into hell ; but Zoroaster 
 himself must perish. According to the legend preserved by Clemen- 
 tine Homily, he is struck by the demon with lightning ; according to 
 Firdusi, he is slain by the Turanians in the sack of Balkh. Accord- 
 ing as the imagination conceives the thunder-storm in view of the 
 light which preceded, or that which follows it, the god of light dies or 
 is victorious. But the dead god is succeeded by another; the slain 
 is avenged by some relative, son, or brother in the myth. And the 
 final victory is won by all the early heroes returning again; or by a 
 descendant of Zoroaster, Caoshyani;." ** 
 
 The impressive fact about this Iranian myth is that it 
 affiHatcs each martyr of Ahura's gospel both to his suc- 
 cessor and to his predecessor; so that the sacred seed 
 proves itself immortal, and death is constantly swallowed 
 up in necessary victory. Ga}'6mard comes from the seed 
 of the Bull ; from Gayomard comes the line of heroes who 
 fight the dragon, or slay the demons, or hold the Devil him- 
 self in curb ; from their line comes the prophet with his 
 word of doom, before which Ahriman trembles ; and when, 
 spite of all the saints, heroes, and martyrs, the earth falls 
 under the dominion of evil,^ and the rotten body of hu- 
 manity dissolves, it is but to reveal the reserved health and 
 salvation in the omnipotent virtue of their return in one 
 high host to judgment, not one gift or glory lost, the seed 
 of Zoroaster at their head, and the souls of all just men, 
 the better souls of all men, to evolve and people a purified 
 world. The nature of this affiliation will appear from an 
 outline of the myth in its relation to ideal progress. 
 
 Yima, most blessed of men, ruler and maker of the 
 earthly paradise, began to love lying speech, and fell. 
 
 1 Mythic king of men, who chains Ahriman, and rides him as a horse over the earth ; but 
 tempted by his wife to fear, is devoured by the great enemy. 
 
 - Darmesteter: Ormazd ei Ahrhnan, p. 211. 
 
 " The terrible accounts of the depravity and misery of the world before the coming of the 
 last redeemers is believed by Darmesteter to be drawn in a large degree by the Bundehesh 
 writers from the Mongol and Arabian wars. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 93 
 
 Three times did his " majesty," or bhss, take the wings of 
 a bird and fly away. Thrice was it seized and brought 
 back. The first who brought back the bhss of Paradise 
 was Mithra, the lord of wide pastures, all-hearing, all-be- 
 holding, truth-protecting Sun. (For he dispels the dark.) 
 The second was Thraetona,^ born in farthest bounds of 
 space,^ whence come the rude blasts of the storm-cloud. 
 He delivered from these, and from the sicknesses, pains, 
 and wants that proceed from them. He wars with the 
 great serpent of the cloud {Acki-dahdka, the Vritra of the 
 Vedas), and is called the victorious. The third was Kere- 
 ^agpa, who delivered from the wild beasts, the robber, and 
 the armed wilderness-foe ; and he is called the Strong One. 
 He is son of Thrita, whom the Vendidad calls the first 
 of physicians, holder-back of sickness and death.^ But 
 Yima's bliss was physical merely. These saviours saved 
 only the man of the senses. Yima could not meditate on 
 the law, nor bear it to men.^ His paradise was the reign 
 of innocence and physical comfort : no cold nor heat, no 
 disease nor death, till falsehood entered ; and with that 
 the poison of Ahriman smote the natural order, which 
 three physical forces did what they could to restore. But 
 they were insufficient. So in fulness of time came Zoro- 
 aster, the greater deliverer through the law that commands 
 purity of thought, word, and deed, — the law that forces evil 
 powers back into invisible ways, and annihilates them in 
 their spiritual being. The Haoma-Yasht ascribes all these 
 saving forces to the devotion of men through sacrifice of 
 the holy plant ; the Crosh-Yasht, to Craosha, the incarna- 
 tion of the law (his body the Mathra),^ who is associated 
 with completing the forms of religious service, as well as 
 with glorious works of protection and punishment, carry- 
 
 ' Corresponds in main with Vedic Triia (Indra's helper). 
 
 ^ Varena, Vedic Varuna. See careful analysis of the myth, as found in ZantyHd-Yasht, by 
 Westergaard [Ind. Studien, iii. 402-440). This Yasht was unknown to Anquetil. 
 
 * Vendidad, xx. * Vendidad, ii. 10. ^ Yapta, Ivi. 
 
94 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 ing on the victorious strife of Zoroaster. No words can 
 express the absolute trust of the worshipper in this all- 
 mastering upholder and regenerator of the physical order, 
 through the spirit of Ahura, arising from his dwelling 
 on the holy mountain, that shines inwardly with its own 
 light, and combining in himself the corporeal and spirit- 
 ual worlds.-^ 
 
 And in the latter day, through fierce wars and por- 
 tents, the spiritual, prophetic seed of Zoroaster bears 
 other saviours {Caoshyahto, profitable ones) ; ^ and the 
 shut doors of Yima's paradise are reopened, and men 
 and beasts come forth to people the earth swept by the 
 latter deluge of penal rain, till Caoshyaiig, "the Helper," 
 last and greatest, brings a new book of the law, and pro- 
 claims the long battle won, and the dead are raised to 
 judgment, and all evil thought and deed are at an end. 
 And all through the conflict, upheld by human prayer 
 and praise, and upholding every good aim with incon- 
 ceivable reserves of power and love, hover the innumer- 
 able Fravashis,^ the ideal souls of all living beings, from 
 Ahura to his humblest servant and his least work, — the 
 onward pressure of the multitudinous universe itself, gath- 
 ered up into one living aspiration to the Best. 
 
 Notice here, first, the progress from material to spiritual 
 deliverance, — destruction of outward monsters and phy- 
 sical woes; then deliverance from all rebellion and hatred 
 against the good spirit, through the might of holy prophets 
 and the supreme virtue of the holy law. Each step leads 
 upward to the next, and the resources of the spirit are ever 
 adequate to the need.'* Notice next, that the earlier deliv- 
 
 * Yaftia, Ivi. 9, 10 ; Ivii. 9, 10 ; Haug. 
 
 ^ Ya(}ta, xxxlv. 13 ; xliv. 11 ; xlv. 3. Spiegel : Eran. Altertk. ii. 153. 
 ' Fravardin-Yasht. 
 
 * The myth of the storm-cloud, the battle of light with the elements, has risen to the 
 spiritual warfare of the prophet's word with the powers of fa!sehood, at the same time that the 
 actors ceasing to be gods of the atmosphere, are the sons 01" men. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 95 
 
 erers, including Yima, belong also to the mythology of the 
 Vedas; but whereas in the Vedas they are immortal gods, 
 in the Avcsta all, except Mithra, are mortal men. In other 
 words, the war which Vedic mythology placed in the su- 
 perhuman world is brought by the Iranian down to the 
 solid ground of human life. It is man, however endowed 
 and exalted in his powers, still man, that works out deliv- 
 erance for himself. Thus the Yama of the Vedas is god 
 of the future world. Yima of the Iranians is man blessed 
 in the present world. The destroyers of monsters in the 
 Vedas are solar powers personified as deities, and their 
 work stops with releasing the refreshing showers from 
 storm-clouds that hold them back among the mountains. 
 Thraetona and Keregagpa in the Avesta, and Yima also, 
 become saviours as men through the piety of their fathers ;^ 
 and their work is ethical, restoring a world poisoned by 
 human falsehood, and preparing the way for a spiritual 
 law. The material and mythologic names, originally com- 
 mon to both races, have been wrought "up into two differ- 
 ing forms of religious power ; one of them putting man 
 quite out of sight, the other exalting him by works worthy 
 of a god. Religion has here become personal ; its centre 
 is the will ; its energy, nerve-power ; its work, practical 
 deliverance from outward evils and inward sins by a 
 strife that ends but in their destruction. Notice last, that 
 through all the dualism in which evil gets such tremen- 
 dous recognition, there runs the optimism of faith, that the 
 world belongs to righteousness, and all things shall work 
 to make good its claim. Or, to put it religiously, God will 
 surely be ready with help at need, and appear, to save His 
 world. Put these successive saviours of the Avestan faith 
 beside that grand word of the Hindu Krishna (speaking 
 for Vishnu, the all-preserving), " Whensoever virtue is 
 enfeebled, or vice and injustice prevail, then do I become 
 
 ' y'aftta, ix. 
 
g6 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 manifest, from age to age revealed to reassure the falter- 
 ing steps of right ;"i or beside the Johannic doctrine of 
 the " Word made flesh," to fulfil what the prophets and 
 Moses lacked. It is older than either of these. 
 
 Zoroastrianism illustrates the law, that religion ever seeks 
 to make good superior to evil, and in some form or other, 
 logical or otherwise, insists on its ultimate triumph. Reli- 
 gion is man's endeavor to assure himself of this very thing ; 
 it is the promise of his ideal to countervail the ills of life 
 and the sense of sin. But religious assurance is in gen- 
 eral more positive in its assertion of progress and ultimate 
 redemption for society as a whole, through its appointed 
 means, than in affirming the best issues for the individual. 
 And just as Christianity contemplates vast numbers of the 
 human race as destined to become devils in eternal pain, 
 so the Avesta makes the wicked turn into Daevas, or spirits 
 of evil ;^ and one gate of this terrible dualism leads to a 
 populous hell. Even in such dismal failures to reconcile 
 man with the condi1?ions of life, we must acknowledge that 
 religion aims at justice, that its retributions are imperfect 
 eft"orts for righteous ethical sequence. On the Avestan 
 bridge of judgment, the balance hangs poised for all: the 
 judges are Mithra, the truth; Rashnu, eternal righteous- 
 ness ; and Craosha, perfect obedience ; and the questioning 
 of the soul by itself is the last appeal. As in Christianity, 
 the strict arithmetic of penalty is, clumsily enough, broken 
 through by a gleam of at least more kindly spiritual econ- 
 omy, which applies supererogatory merits of saints to the 
 cancelling of other men's sins ; so, if the theory of Spiegel 
 is correct, the virtues of good Zoroastrians are believed to 
 be laid up in a treasury of succor (Migvdna) , to turn the 
 scale, at the last judgment, in behalf of those whose own 
 repentance has not quite outweighed their misdeeds.^ If, 
 
 ' Bhagavad-gita, iv. 6. ^ Vendidad, viii. loo. 
 
 ^ But this view is not confirmed by other writers. See, on one side, Spiegel, Eran. Altertlu 
 ii. 17 ; on the other, Harlez, i. 265 n ; Haug, Essays, etc., p. 389 ; or Vendidad, xix. 122. 
 
AVESTAN DUALISM. 97 
 
 however, this Migvana, or middle world, is rather the in- 
 termediate space between heaven and hell, where those 
 souls are held whose good and evil are equal, it would 
 be at all events an attempt to approximate exact justice, 
 instead of admitting mercy. 
 
 No more than any other religion of the past wliich 
 bases the future destiny of the soul upon the analogy of 
 personal relations in this world, as shown in private emo- 
 tions, or in the courts of justice between man and man, 
 does the religion of Zoroaster reach the assurance which 
 reconciles our actual ignorance of the future with an ideal 
 trust in the laws of our being, the unknown as well as the 
 known. But the statement of its limits is also that of its 
 characteristic power and function in human history. First 
 of great religions, it revealed the power of the personal cle- 
 ment in the religious ideal ; evolving out of man's crude 
 sense of the strife of material nature a conception of spirit- 
 ual struggle and moral prophecy through the energy of 
 individual will, and incarnating this conception in a per- 
 sonal Word, around whom the great conflict of good and 
 evil gathered so supremely that all coming faiths were 
 destined to draw' from the fountains it opened in man- 
 kind. 
 
 And not only did this affirmation of the dignity of the 
 will assure the triumph of what the wilier believed to be 
 best, but saved him from the demoralizing effects of pure 
 Dualism, which would have admitted no solution of the 
 strife. A noble aspiration to unity shaped the whole sys- 
 tem, proceeding from the necessity of the ideal will to 
 secure an undivided ground of action, complete concentra- 
 tion of aim, free and simple self-development. Thus we 
 find in the Avesta each class of objects traced to one 
 beginning, — all waters to one source; all trees to one tree; 
 all animals to the primal Bull ; all men to one progenitor 
 {Gayomard^. Hence, castes are impossible: the king is 
 
 7 
 
98 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 parent of all men; the marriage rule is monogamy; the 
 ethical law is responsibility to one personal principle of 
 right. 
 
 ZRVAN-AKARANA. 
 
 All worship of personal Will involves Dualism, in some 
 form, however incomplete. The power of choosing be- 
 tween opposites is indispensable to the freedom of will; 
 and so long as pure will, as such, is held to be the supreme 
 essence, the law which it is its only real freedom to obey 
 is subordinated to its right of choice, — that is, to caprice; 
 and the worship of will becomes the worship of miracle. 
 This is the inevitable logic of all religions of this kind. 
 But all religions have germs of growth out of this vicious 
 circle. Even in Mazdeism, the typical religion of personal 
 Will, there were intimations of this need of somewhat 
 greater than such will ; and these intimations associated 
 themselves with its movement out of Dualism, prompting 
 it to solve the antagonism of Ormuzd and Ahriman in a 
 common source. This is the significance of the Zervanitic 
 doctrine in later Mazdeism.^ It was one of a series of 
 cosmogonic efforts, deriving the world ^from elements of 
 universal order, such as Light, Space, Time, Fate : and a 
 direct result of the most important of these conceptions, — 
 namely, that of Fate.^ 
 
 Every thoughtful person must recognize universal law 
 as master of all individual intentions or aims. The mind 
 which has not learned that the world is governed by forces 
 to which all wills of whatever power must conform, has 
 had but slight experience of life. The noblest hope and 
 desire are most closely confronted by insuperable limits. 
 Before these primal conditions of existence, these inscrut- 
 able realities of law, — call it either cosmical or spiritual, — 
 
 1 Spiegel's Avesta, ii. 218, note iii. xxxix. 
 
 ^ The Parsis of the present time are not dualists; the old meaning of the Avesia is 
 lost for them. 
 
ZRVAN-AKARANA. 99 
 
 all gods must bend. Their order upholds all self-conscious 
 being like a sea. This is the impersonal soul, the incon- 
 ceivable essence, which comes to us as divine necessity, 
 and which we must learn to hold benignant and dear for- 
 ever. All great personal religions have hints and gleams 
 of this light beyond their own, this supremacy over the 
 objects of their worship, even when they strive to regard 
 the two as one; because men cannot help feeling such 
 predominance of substance over will in their own lives. 
 The greatest of religions, the universal religion, will be 
 characterized by enthroning it, trustingly and deliberately, 
 above all conceptions of Divine Purpose or Will. I seek 
 instinctive germs of this truth in every positive religion. I 
 think I can discern how such an instinct helped Mazdeism 
 resolve its Dualism into something like unity. 
 
 The sway of Destiny over all motion, spiritual and phy- 
 sical, was expressed by the Hindus in the term Bhaga, 
 meaning the " allotter or giver." The word Bakht, from 
 the same root, is used in the older Avesta in the general 
 sense of celestial appointment, without reference to any 
 personal source.^ But in the later writings this idea be- 
 came more distinctly associated with the movement of the 
 stars and planets, and with the strife in which they were 
 supposed to be engaged.^ From these movements destiny 
 was supposed to proceed, and in a more strict and positive 
 sense than in the ordinary and wide-spread faith in astro- 
 logical influences. Thus it appears that in the worshipper 
 of free-will and choice, the movements of the heavenly 
 bodies, even conceived as strife, were capable of awakening 
 a reverent sense of supreme order, irreversible law, and 
 predetermined result.^ 
 
 ' Darmesteter : Ormazd et Akriman, p. 319-20. Haug : Essays, etc., p. 273. 
 
 ^ J^fifidkkired, viii. 17. 
 
 3 Both the Chinese and the European languages use the word "heaven" to express the 
 sense of all-controlling destiny, where a personal term seems to be less in accordance with the 
 impression of order and law. 
 
lOO DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Now, it is easy to see how this divine and resistless 
 march of the heavenly powers came to be identified with 
 the flow of Time, of Boundless Time,^ — its obvious con- 
 dition, and its most impressive suggestion. The Greek 
 made Cronos the oldest of gods; and it is, in a sense, 
 our necessity to conceive of time as the all-determining, 
 all-resolving power of Fate. Whatsoever is past recall, 
 whatsoever must be but is not yet, the certainties of past 
 and future alike, are offspring of Time, whereof none saw 
 the beginning, none can foresee the end. Time is the 
 Hindu Kali, with the worlds strung about her neck hke 
 skulls of the dead. Time is the all-engulfing god of the 
 Bhagavad-gita, down whose open mouth rush the genera- 
 tions. Time is the one sure movement, the one inevitable 
 path. The heavenly legions on their ordered march through 
 boundless time and space,— those undying fires man fails 
 to reach, yet never fails to behold ; those gods of all ages, 
 obedient to a mysterious Order beyond themselves, — might 
 well seem to bind past, present, and future into one all- 
 determining Fate. But if time was the ground of these 
 celestial movements for the Mazdean, not less would it 
 be the parent and sure promise of all the spiritual and 
 material glories which he expected from the triumph of 
 his law. Even in the Vendidad it is here and there in- 
 voked, together with the Word and the self-sustaining 
 heavens, equally with the gods themselves.^ And the 
 Minokhired, at the end, sums up the accomplishment of 
 destined good through the toils and sufferings of the 
 past.^ 
 
 1 Minokhired, xxvii lo ; viii. 17. "The things of the world are moved by Destiny, and 
 the regular course of that which is self-created — Time, the ruler of the long ages." As it is 
 appointed to each in ever^' time, so it is accomplished, " so that the good which should come 
 through those who have departed, to the creatures of Ahura, has been brought to pass." 
 
 2 Vendidad, xix. 55. For later development of Zrvan-akarana, see Carre: V Ancien 
 Orient., ii. 379. 
 
 3 It is scarcely necessary to say that by this term I but mean that imperfect form of 
 dualism which has been already allowed as belonging to Avestan religion. 
 
ZRVAN-AKARANA. I 01 
 
 Mazdean Dualism, then, contained in itself the germs of 
 this principle of reconciliation. No resort could have been 
 more natural. Whatever modifications it may have re- 
 ceived from Babylonian sources, this sovereignty of Time 
 without bounds was the demand of personal will for a 
 ground of confidence beyond the strife of its own free 
 choice, or any idealization of the same. That it came 
 through the sense of all-mastering movement in those 
 heavenly fires which had always been the symbol of 
 deity, simply shows that Nature inevitably brings the 
 recognition of unity in the religious conceptions. But it 
 was easier to escape the bonds of Dualism than the in- 
 capacity of worshipping any other than some form of 
 personal will. And Zrvan-akarana, though a resort to 
 an impersonal element, became no less personal than 
 Ormuzd, and no less the centre of anthropomorphic my- 
 thology. Still the Bundehesh, as late at least as the Sas- 
 sanian times, does not represent Zrvan as a person. Its 
 first chapter either describes Ahura as " possessing end- 
 less time,"^ or else the "Time of Ahura" as that which 
 "was, and is, and is to be."^ And Ahriman is said to 
 exist for a time which shall have its end. There is no 
 cosmogonic expression here, no hint of the origin of 
 either from a pre-existent God. 
 
 About the same period, however,Theodore of Mopsuestia 
 wrote that Zoroaster made Zarouavi, ruler of the whole 
 universe, and called him Destiny ; and that this first god 
 produced both Ormuzd and Ahriman (or Satan). This 
 was the general belief of the Armenian Christian writers 
 of that period, and shows that it was largely under the 
 influence of Syrian Christianity that the change of Zrvan 
 from an abstract to a personal form must have taken 
 place. In the later Persian sects, formed under Semitic 
 
 1 Mit unbegranzter Zeit begabt. Windischmann. 
 
 ^ Die Zeit des Ahuramazda war, und ist, und wird sein. Justi. 
 
I02 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 and Christian relations, the Zervanites, or beHevers in Time 
 as a supreme god, were especially noticed by the Mussul- 
 man writers.^ But the struggle of good and evil is not to 
 be ended by the triumph of one Will, one Person, one Lord, 
 whatever his name, over other beings equal or inferior. 
 For no service of a person can make free or holy ; only 
 the service of righteous principles, — of truth as truth, and 
 good as good, not as the will of God or man. Zoroastrian- 
 ism, — and, we must add, Christianity, — for want of this 
 final step upon impersonal foundations, have been fated, 
 with all their modifications, to revolve in the same circle 
 of ethical weakness and limited sight. Thus the new Maz- 
 dean god, though a resort to natural order, was but an 
 imperfect and transient foregleam of what only ages of 
 science following on ages of this anthropomorphic worship 
 could bring. Nevertheless, as such resort, it was one of 
 those landmarks in history that indicate the path of spirit- 
 ual evolution. And it is such landmarks, discernible to the 
 careful student of comparative religion, that makes reli- 
 gious history of most value to us to-day. 
 
 Zrvan gradually becomes indentified with other deities 
 of similar name, but different meaning, and of Semitic or 
 Median origin ; and a mixed mythology of shreds and 
 patches gathers about the old reconciling Time-idea, till 
 it becomes as finite as the gods it was said to have created. 
 Ormuzd and Ahriman reappear dressed in the patriarchal 
 robes of Esau and Jacob ; and the old Zrvan, tricked by 
 the younger and evil-minded son, retains so little of his 
 Time-mastery as to be obliged to grant him nine thousand 
 years of rule in the world. Hindu legends of creation of 
 the world through sacrificial suicide of a god, are infused 
 among Mazdean traditions utterly opposed to their ascetic 
 and mystical spirit. But through all changes and all syn- 
 cretism of systems abides the old faith that good shall be 
 
 1 See Haug's Essays, etc., p. 15. 
 
ZRVAN AKARANA. IO3 
 
 triumphant at last; and that assurance, which in the begin- 
 ning helped Avestan Dualism from practical failure to re- 
 concile man with the conditions of life, maintains the like 
 function in the latest phases of Mazdeism. It inspires the 
 worship of Zrvan as well as that of Ahura. And there- 
 fore it is not, in either of these phases, a mere trust in 
 personal will, but rests, in part at least, on confidence in 
 the natural tendency of things ; on the necessities of the 
 world and of man. Nor can I hesitate to accept, as at 
 least in accordance with the laws of evolution, the striking 
 summary of religious systems by a distinguished Oriental 
 scholar, which represents "all their first principles, — Time, 
 Fate, Light, Space, as forms of One, — namely. Heaven, or 
 the Sky, considered in its movement, or its brightness, or 
 its extent. Ormuzd begins by being the luminous infinite 
 Heaven. And the same principle has given the Indo- 
 European family their Supreme God."^ 
 
 A still broader generalization may be based upon that 
 one of these principles with which our Iranian studies 
 have thus far been most concerned. If we remember that 
 through all the strife of good and evil which man has felt 
 within him and beheld without, his imagination has re- 
 mained loyal to that transcendent symbol the Light, in 
 which his conscious religious life found its first inspira- 
 tion, we shall assuredly be convinced that the worship of 
 Nature is not only the natural, but the sane and sacred 
 track of humanity. 
 
 On this track lies the real solution of Dualism, which 
 Zoroastrianism and all the other religions of the past, 
 with all their compensations and foregleams, have failed 
 to accomplish. That " the fall of the race through the 
 bad use that its earliest progenitors made of their free-will 
 is the only solution of the formidable problem " of evil,^ is 
 
 ' Darmesteter: Ortnazd et Akriman, -pTp. 336-37. 
 
 ^ Lenormant : Contemporary Review, September, 1879. 
 
I04 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 a mere Biblico-historical dogma, which does not touch the 
 root of the matter, but simply puts it back in time, and 
 involves it in deeper complications. If evil be what the 
 Bible represents it, no such misuse of free-will by the first 
 men, or the last men, can account for it. It has been said, 
 and there is truth in the statement, that the Hebrew es- 
 caped the association of darkness with evil. His form of 
 dualism was absorbed in the conception of a God above 
 both light and darkness, of whom they were the products : 
 "The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee." But 
 this noble plane of Hebrew prophecy, higher than any 
 point reached by Chaldean, Persian, or Phoenician, does 
 not solve the problem of evil, — the deeper dualism which 
 no special symbol exhausts. The will of a God alone is 
 not sufficient to answer it. Nor can any revelation of 
 such will serve better the demand of reason in our age. 
 Evil, physical and moral, cannot be instituted by any 
 personal will. 
 
 Dualism is in Nature, in man ; good and evil, both in 
 the physical and ethical si^heres, cannot be ignored. Their 
 conflict is the tremendous reality, which no religion can 
 possibly put out of sight. It is the glory of Mazdeism to 
 have struck root in this central fact: its failure, to have 
 ended in solutions which solve nothing. For no triumph 
 of one personal will over another, or of one kind of will- 
 ing over another, no utter extermination of half the will- 
 power of the universe, can explain or justify the tragic 
 hate and strife. Only when it is recognized that, behind 
 the conflict of good and evil wills whether human or 
 divine, — the antagonism of purpose by which character is 
 formed and virtue enthroned over sorrow and sin, — there 
 is in the nature of things a law that evil is the condition of 
 good ; that without the lower the higher could not be ; that 
 liberty and progress, and love and duty, and heroism and 
 devotion, imply the existence of evil, and ripen through its 
 
ZRVAN AKARANA. IO5 
 
 tasks ; and that this necessity, in the eternal nature of 
 things, uses all personality to serve its own uncreated law 
 of growth, — only when this religion of Nature shall sup- 
 plant the religions which ultimate in man-made divinities 
 of Will, which they themselves must take for granted, can 
 the dark riddle of ages be solved. 
 
II. 
 
 MORALITY OF THE AVESTA. 
 
^'- 
 
 MORALITY OF THE AVESTA. 
 
 TT might seem that httle could be said for the morality 
 •*- of a system which insists as earnestly on the criminality 
 of killing an otter, or dropping one's nail-parings about 
 the house, as on the slaying of a man. Very strange re- 
 sults came in process of time of that complete confusion 
 of the physical and moral worlds inherent in Iranian 
 dualism. We can readily see that it was only logical that 
 all the evil purpose of Ahriman should appear to be incar- 
 nated in each of his creatures, and to call for its destruc- 
 tion as the highest duty; and that all the goodness of 
 Ahuramazda should be embodied in each good and help- 
 ful product thereof, and demand its preservation with equal 
 energy. We have already seen upon what trivial associa- 
 tions many creatures were proved pure or impure ; yet 
 there can be no doubt that the choice was in a measure 
 determined by real gratitude and sympathetic respect on 
 the part of these simple tribes, whose chief interests were 
 the protection of their settlements and the security of the 
 products of their industry. And why should not the watch- 
 dog be made a centre of superstitious awe and jealous care 
 by a people at that stage of progress, as the bread and wine 
 of atonement by a more introversive religion? 
 
 " I have made the dog, O Zarathustra, with keen scent and sharp 
 teeth, faithful to man, as a protection to the folds, — I. who am Ahura- 
 mazda. When he is sound and in good voice, no thief nor wolf can 
 come nigh." " For the dwellings would not stand fast on the earth 
 created by Ahuramazda, but for the dogs which pertain to the cattle 
 and the village."^ 
 
 * yendiddd, xVn, io6, m, 163. 
 
no DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 By slaying a certain kind of dog, the offender — reckless 
 of Ahura's good purpose, and sinning against his will — 
 " slays his own soul, and the effects of the act last for nine 
 generations. " ^ He who kills a trained hound excites ab- 
 horrence; and at his death no other soul can deliver him, 
 nor will the dogs help him at the bridge of judgment.^ The 
 penalty for giving hurtful food to a pup is fifty blows with 
 the horse-goad, and fifty with the scourge {p^aosho-charafia). 
 Minute rules for expelling demons from different organs 
 of the body, for purifying it from touch of the dead,^ for 
 removing menstrual uncleanness, for the disposal of exuviae 
 like the dead hair or nails, are parts of the great struggle 
 to cleanse the living world from the decay and death which 
 are Ahriman's instruments. They are neither better nor 
 worse in themselves than other forms of ritual purification, 
 which are in the physical world what processes for sanctifi- 
 cation are in the spiritual. This equal insistence on things 
 external and internal, this attachment of solemn sanctions 
 to doings in themselves thoroughly trivial, illustrates a 
 confusion of the physical and moral spheres common to 
 all religions, and unavoidable in the absence of physical 
 science, which finds itself confronted down to the latest 
 moment by a similar class of superstitions, such as pray- 
 ing for the removal of drought or pestilence, and expect- 
 ing Providential interference with physical laws. With the 
 Iranian, in special degree, an intense propensity to symbol- 
 ism gave everything in the physical world a corresponding 
 meaning for the spiritual. This meaning was not so much 
 consciously applied, as immediately actualized or enacted 
 by direct will, — a nerve-force by which mind and body 
 were in such close rapport that they might be called the 
 poles of one substance. All the stock phrases of the 
 Avesta, — " pure mind and body;" "purity of thought, 
 word, and deed;" "the beautiful body of Ahuramazda;" 
 
 1 Vendidad, xiii. 7. ' Ibid., xiii. 21-25- = I^id., ix. 6. 
 
MORALITY OF THE AVESTA. Ill 
 
 " the soul of the Bull," — indicate this closeness of relation 
 of the physical and spiritual : each is seen in the other, not 
 inferred from it. The world is known as ethics ; the will, 
 as acts, forms, things done. Physical acts, destroying evil or 
 preserving good things, actually enlarge the world of good. 
 This intense concreteness of ethical passion or fire, unre- 
 strained by prudential wisdom or physical science, explains 
 the vast outlays of energy on things acceptable to Ahura, 
 — in parks, paradises, dogs, irrigation, culture of the land, 
 destruction of idols and noxious creatures, rites and pomps. 
 Mass had essential spiritual value in these things ; every 
 insect killed, told for so much penance or moral service. 
 The " Acta Martyrum Persarum " says that to kill flies 
 was a sign of conversion from Christ to Zoroaster ! The 
 blows with the scourge {craosho-charana) , which were sup- 
 posed to have been given to the back of the offender, were 
 in fact given by him to the noxious creatures of Ahriman; 
 and even penance was estimated in good works.-^ 
 
 This confusion of physical and moral, with its accom- 
 panying ritualism, does not forbid a marked degree of 
 ethical earnestness in the Avesta. The Bible of free-will, 
 it insists everywhere on free choice and life-long consecra- 
 tion to the moral war. Its root-idea is, that falsehood 
 (infidelity to thought or faith) is radically destructive; 
 that truth is practically creative and holy. Penalties for 
 violation of promise or contract {mithro-druj), affect not 
 only the offender, but descend to his children.^ In later 
 times, tremendous self-imprecations were drawn up as 
 guards against falsehood ; ^ and we know from the Greeks 
 what importance the Persians attached to truth. Light 
 itself is truth. The promise must be kept, evejt zuith an 
 unbeliever. The value of all outward acts was in purity of 
 thought and upright will. The Gatha-ahunavaiti says: 
 " They whose thoughts are not pure, from them the good 
 
 ^ Harlez, ii. loi. - Mihr-VasM, 2. ' Avesta, ii. Ivii. ; Spiegel. 
 
112 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 spirit flees." ^ The Hadokht-Nask says: "The one recital 
 of the Word which is worth all that exists, is that when the 
 speaker forsakes evil thoughts, words, and deeds." ^ "Our 
 own souls praise we, our own Fravashis praise we;" and 
 " may you seek for what is better than the good." ^ This 
 ideal ignores all differences of age, or time, or sex : " The 
 Fravashis of all pure men and women in all regions praise 
 we." * " We praise all the just men and women that are, 
 have been, or shall be." ^ Then as for duties to others : 
 Yima's paradise of world-innocence was where " no strife 
 entered, nor vexation, nor enmity, nor deceit." The Vis- 
 pered says: "Have ready feet, hands, wills, to do good 
 works and avoid evil ones." " Do good, give help to the 
 helpless."*^ The holiest verse (A /iziua-^^aijy a), distilled sub- 
 stance of the Word, says: "The kingdom to Ahura, whose 
 law protects the weak."'^ And this is the vow of the be- 
 liever : " With purity and good-will, O Ahura, I will pro- 
 tect the poor who serves Thee." ^ He who does not pay 
 a just debt " is a thief of the loan, a robber of what is lent 
 to him."^ In the later Minokhired, it is pronounced meri- 
 torious to build caravansaries.^*^ And see the confidence in 
 an " all-beholding, all-renewing, unsleeping Helper of the 
 just and good : " " Mithra, grant that we may be well-wish- 
 ing, of friendly mind, loved and honored, and may slay 
 every evil desire," — "Mithra, whom the lord of the region, 
 the ruler of the clan, and the master of the household ever 
 with uplifted hands call to aid ; whom the poor man, de- 
 voted to the law but robbed of his goods, ever with uplifted 
 hands calls to aid ; the voice of whose weeping ascends to 
 
 ' i'aftia, xxxiv. S. 
 
 - " Righteousness is the only true purification." — Vendiddd, x. 38. 
 
 3 Vafna, Iviii. 5, 8. * Fravardin-Yasht, 144. 
 
 ^ J'rt(-«rt, xli. 4, 5. 6 Visfiered, xviii. 1-5. 
 
 1 Roth translates the Ahuna-vairya differently. " Ahura has placed in this world, as well 
 as in the better, a shepherd for those who need." {Zeitsch. d. Deiitsch. Morgetd. Gesellsch 
 XXV. 20. ) " Craosha has built a firm abode for the poor." — i'a(Ka, Ivi 4. 
 
 ^ Ya^na, xxxiv. 5. ^ Vendidadt'v). 1,2. ^° Avesia, ii. Iviii. 
 
MORALITY OF THE AVESTA. II3 
 
 the stars and goes round the earth," — " Mithra, whose 
 long arms grasp forward with strength ; from far Indies 
 to farthest West, and on the Northern stream, and at the 
 ends of the world. The unrighteous thinks, ' Mithra sees 
 not these evil deeds ; ' but I think in my soul no man on 
 earth with hundredfold strength thinks, speaks, or does so 
 much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength thinks, speaks, 
 and does good." ^ 
 
 Craosha smites the unchaste.^ The Gathas admonish 
 young married couples to " clothe each other with purity, 
 after the righteous law, and bring great joy." ^ The Ven- 
 didad shows its respect for pure relations between the 
 sexes, when it makes the giving of one's sister or daughter 
 as a pure virgin to a true believer an atonement for injur- 
 ing a creature pure to Ahura, or believed to protect the 
 husbandman's food.'^ Marriage with unbelievers is for- 
 bidden.° The married are of course honored beyond the 
 unmarried ; and while there are no signs of polygamy in 
 the Avesta, — though Greek writers of a later date assert its 
 existence,^ to a limited extent, and also the Shah-Nameh, 
 — the later Parsi writings define strictly the grounds that 
 allow the husband to put aside his wife, and even permit 
 him to take another to secure posterity, since increase of 
 progeny adds strength to Ahura's hosts.*^ The poor, how- 
 ever, had but one wife. Marriage with near relatives was 
 in high esteem, probably as keeping the clan-blood pure.^ 
 The marriage of even the nearest, — a result of the primi- 
 tive veneration for ties of blood, — was, according to the 
 Bundehesh,^ one of the three inviolable things with which 
 Ahriman could not intermingle, the custom being derived 
 
 ' Mihr-Yasht, 34, S4, 85. 105, 106. ^ Vafna, Ivi. 7. 
 
 5 Ya^-na, lii. 5. * Vendiddd, xiv. 64-66 ; xiii. 169. 
 
 ^ Veiididady xv;ii. 123, 124. 
 
 ^ Herodotus says that the Persians of his day have many wives and concubines; and 
 Strabo adds, for the purpose of gaining children. 
 
 ' Avesta, ii. xxxi. ; Spiegel. * Vispered, iii. 18; Herod., iii. 88 
 
 8 Bundehesh, xxxv. 
 
 s 
 
1 14 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 from the Persians of the older time.^ We do not hesitate 
 to set this down as proof, in that age of the world, that 
 the awe of religion centred in the family, and made all 
 that bound its members, for present and future time, in 
 closest union supremely sacred. The Vendidad has laws 
 against infanticide, holding man, woman, and child alike 
 guilty; also commanding that the father of an illegitimate 
 child shall maintain it.^ We find no definition either of 
 marital powers (except the general command to the wife 
 to obey the husband) or of parental rights. The Vispered 
 calls "the mistress of the house" to the sacrifice, "the 
 woman of pure thoughts, words, acts, irreproachable, and 
 submissive to her spiritual teacher." ^ 
 
 All virtues centre in the duty of spreading the good 
 Mazdayagnian law of purity {As/ia),'^ — the profit of the 
 world. No sin like the violation of that law ; no terms 
 of friendship with the unbeliever in it.^ Mazdean moral- 
 ity is indeed often brought into contradiction with natural 
 humanity, like that of other religions, by its dependence 
 on the interests of the faith. Thus physicians, where they 
 are uncertain about remedies, are to experiment first, not 
 on Mazdeans, but on unbelievers. Nevertheless, not even 
 with these shall the true believer deal falsely.^ The sa- 
 credness of the elements made the acts of all other faiths 
 intolerable in many ways. Yet the Persian kings for the 
 most part were tolerant. The Iranians believed themselves 
 a chosen people, sent to redeem the world ; and this, as 
 with the Hebrews, was but the natural climax of a vehe- 
 ment self-assertion of the personal will. Ahriman's temp- 
 tation of Zoroaster consisted in the attempt to induce him 
 
 1 Deog. Laert. and Strabo. 2 Vendidad, xv. 
 
 * Vispered, iii. 20. < Vispered, viii. 11. 
 
 5 The unbelievers, teachers of evil doctrine (Karapans and Kavis), are said {Ya^na, xxxii.) 
 to destroy the holy words and the spirit cf life ; to spoil Ahura's good intent, and help the 
 wicked who make desolate the fields, and destroy the cattle. It does not seem easy to iden- 
 tify these enemies, who certainly could not have been Ar^•ans. Harlez. 
 
 6 Mihr- Ynshi, i 
 
MORALITY OF THE AVESTA. II5 
 
 to curse the good Mazdaya^nian law, and was defeated by 
 his reciting the sacred formula,^ the Ahuna-vairya. The 
 Haomas, Beregmas, and the various priestly names and 
 services by which the ritual was conducted, and in which 
 the virtue of the law was carried, were called the "victo- 
 rious remedies;"^ and these organized forms of propa- 
 gandism came more and more to absorb into themselves 
 'the meaning of " purity." The priests, who are hardly 
 emphasized in the oldest Gathas, gradually became con- 
 spicuous, and priestly purity is celebrated in hymns and 
 prayers. They seem to have had no power except that 
 of performing rites, and of receiving a portion of the offer- 
 ing; and the " pure man," as such, appears competent to 
 religious functions in the Zoroastrian system. He is in 
 fact pure by virtue of rightly fulfilling the religious order. 
 The later, more strictly organized priesthood were prob- 
 ably of Median origin. No offering of blood to Ahura or 
 his powers ; creatures were cut in pieces, all but a part of 
 the caul, to be carried away by the worshippers and eaten : 
 the gods did not want the body, but the soul (the dead 
 being impure). So says Strabo ; ^ and this is in accord- 
 ance with the Avesta. Nothing here justifies the holocaust 
 of Persian kings, which could only have been for food ; 
 nor the burial of living men, which was in honor of deities 
 under the earth {Chthojiioi), — such as are recorded of 
 Queen Amestris and others. 
 
 The service was a prayer and hymn ; Haoma juice 
 poured out; bread and fruits, use of the "holy cup." 
 Prayers were offered for others; for the dead, for the 
 pure, for the creatures of Ahura. So the Persians, we 
 are told, prayed for all Persians. 
 
 Practical religious earnestness, and the wide sweep of 
 Ahura's purpose over all exclusive ambitions, in personal 
 discipline or positive labor, made caste impossible. The 
 
 * Vendidad, xix. ' Vis/>ered, viii. ^ Strabo, xv- 
 
Il6 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Gathas divide the Iranians into four classes, — priests, 
 warriors, agriculturists, and artisans ; ^ and tliese, by exer- 
 cise of the duty of " the pure man," equally bring forth 
 the Holy Word of right thought, word, and deed.^ Caste 
 was never established, in any proper sense, in Iran. The 
 clan was developed to contain chiefs of the house, village, 
 tribe, province, and " Zarathustra as the fifth " in some re- 
 gions ; as the fourth in others.^ What is Zoroaster here? 
 High priest? It may be. But there is no mistaking in 
 the Avesta the aristocratic tone which inheres in the wor- 
 ship of will, even in the organization of the early Iranians ; 
 as we see in the Vispered, where is given the ritual of the 
 Gahanbar feasts, in honor of the six days of creation, or six 
 seasons, six yearly feasts described in the Bundehcsh. It 
 opens with an invitation to lords and chiefs of all kinds, 
 typical heads of creatures, qualities, forms, every one of 
 which is thus represented in the great dualistic war. 
 These typical chiefs are called the " givers " of the classes 
 in question ; and so there are hierarchical orders of priests, 
 just as Ahura has his subordinates, and these their own, in 
 celestial descending series. In the (later) Khordad-Yasht, 
 Zoroaster is forbidden to teach the law to any other than 
 the priestly family (so the sentence is interpreted) ; but this 
 could not have been done in the time of the Gathas. A 
 striking illustration of the formulizing spirit, and its work 
 upon the accumulated material of later ethics and ritual- 
 ism, is found in the Patets, or confessional formulas, which 
 contain anxiously minute enumerations of every conceiv- 
 able short-coming, and prayers for forgiveness of every 
 sin that could be thought of, as if everything depended 
 on specifying every iota of desire or conscience in the lit- 
 urgy, all of which indicates a long period of real ethical 
 
 * VaftuiyXJx. 17; Haug. 
 
 2 Haug's translation, making appointment of a spiritual guide one of these duties, is cer- 
 tainly doubtful. ' }'<tf>ia, xix. 18. 
 
MORALITY OF THE AVESTA. 1 17 
 
 earnestness before it could have come to this. The seri- 
 ous business of self-disciphne seems to have haunted the 
 Iranians of the Avesta; and the very fables of the race, 
 it has been observed, " are free from the wild excesses of 
 imagination, and have a severe and moral aspect." ^ 
 
 It is impossible to deny the moral earnestness of a faith 
 whose ceremonial invocations enumerate hosts of good 
 men. The preservation of their names alone, in this form, 
 is the surest evidence of long ages of pious gratitude and 
 honor to the best.^ That hero-worship, which we have af- 
 firmed to be at the root of Iranian mind, has here its per- 
 fect illustration. The " Fravashis of the pure " are the 
 earliest type of a religion of humanity, foreshadowing 
 the modern cultus of genius and character. Here begins 
 the religious recognition of human personality. The Bun- 
 dehesh gives as the significance of the myth which brings 
 forth man from the seed of Gayomard in the form of a tree, 
 from whose leaves sprang ten varieties of men and women, 
 the sexes inseparable from each other and not to be told 
 apart, — that the soul being first made, and placed in the 
 body as its instrument, lifts this by its invisible power to the 
 upright form ; and, like a tree, strives upward, that it may 
 come to the Yazatas, or heavenly ones.^ " To the pro- 
 genitors of mankind Ahura said, 'Speak ye good words, 
 do good acts, vield not to the evil ones ; be perfect.' " ^ 
 The destiny of men and spirits hangs on the majesty of 
 Truth, and on the weakness and self-destruction of False- 
 hood. Ahriman's fatality is that he chooses a he, and so 
 sees nothing truly, blundering till it is too late to save him- 
 self; while Ahura, because he is truth, foresees the tenden- 
 cies of the world, and wins the conflict before it begins. 
 
 * Harlez, ii. 46. 
 
 2 Fravardin-Yasht. The Bundehesh gathers up chronological data covering zodiacal 
 periods with ethical and moral personages ; xxxiv. 
 
 " Bundehesh, xv. ; Justi. 4 Ibid., xxxiiL 
 
Il8 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 And when he foretells the issue to his great enemy, so 
 overwhelming is the presence of Truth that Ahriman at 
 the first third of what he hears, bends in fear ; at the sec- 
 ond, falls on his knees ; at the third, flees and buries him- 
 self in darkness for three thousand years. So inestimable 
 and imperishable is the Law of Truth embodied in its 
 great Prophet, that the seed of Zoroaster is held under 
 the guardianship of a million Fravashis of the Pure.^ 
 
 * Bundefiesk, xxxiii. 
 
III. 
 
 ZARATHUSTRA. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 
 
 IT is remarkable that a religion which represents the 
 worship of personality in its intensest degree should 
 have been destined to lose almost every personal record 
 of its origin. Zoroaster is the obscurest figure in the line 
 of prophets and messiahs.-^ It is even uncertain, notwith- 
 standing Spiegel's strong impression of unity in the final 
 form of the Avesta, whether the personal references, either 
 in the oldest or latest parts of that work of ages, point to 
 any one historical founder or systematizer of the faith. 
 Such have been the fortunes of the Avesta, that not only 
 have the greater portion of its original books (nosks) been 
 lost, but the heroic traditions of the Iranian race, which 
 might have thrown light upon its religious history, can be 
 brought into connection therewith only by the very imper- 
 fect hints and incidental notices contained in three or four 
 chapters. The passages in which Zarathustra is either 
 referred to or introduced as speaking in person, which are 
 made the most of in Haug's translation, are not of decis- 
 ive importance. Even the striking passage in the (^rosh- 
 Yasht, which ascribes to him the authorship of the five 
 Gathas,^ does not conclusively prove historic personality; 
 and the prophet comes before us mainly as an ideal per- 
 sonage. Whether calling men to repentance and choice 
 between good and evil, or conversing with Ahura ; whether 
 in prayer, in ritual service, or in temptation; whether 
 
 ' See Spiegel {Koniglich bayerische Akadeniie der lVisse7ischu/ten, January, 1867), who 
 shows, by a complete analysis of authorities, how entire this uncertainty is. 
 2 Yagna, Ivi. 
 
122 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 exalted or persecuted, — he is the official and chosen in- 
 strument of his God. The human element is absorbed in 
 the divine function of propagator of the law through the 
 miraculous power of the Word. He expresses no sense 
 of humility in view of his great mission ; he performs no 
 heroic act. No sympathy is sought in his behalf And 
 all the apparent records of his life might easily be the con- 
 structed tradition of a body of priests. Moses, Buddha, 
 Jesus, of whom much the same officialism is true, though 
 in different ways, had the advantage of written records. 
 And this is also true of Confucius, who enters no other 
 than natural claims. But the founder of the Iranian reli- 
 gion could have had no aid from writing; and the Iranian 
 Word, by whomsoever spoken, must have been committed 
 solely to the energy of the moral idea, to the antagonism 
 of good with evil, to the inspiration of will by a common 
 impulse. 
 
 The name Zarathustra, at all events, cannot of itself 
 stand for any special individual, since the numerous inter- 
 pretations of it, — as "star of gold," "star of life," "singer 
 of praise," " brave camel owner," and " seed of Venus " 
 (Ishtar), — are becoming superseded (at least so far as 
 they are supposed to designate such individuality) by that 
 which explains it as the generic name of the Iranian high- 
 priesthood, and as simply meaning "spiritual elder" or 
 " chief." ^ Following Parsi traditions,^ Haug regards Cpi- 
 tama, frequently used in connection with Zarathustra, as 
 the real or family name of the prophet. We have here 
 another illustration of the historic law that those names 
 by which traditional founders of religions have come down 
 to us, are simply designations of spiritual or ecclesiastical 
 function; such as the Buddha, the Messiah (Christ), the 
 
 ^ That the word has a superlative [,Zarathustrbtetjio), seems decisive of the question. 
 Haug hss strongly insisted on this meaning (Essays, etc.), p. 296 ; somewhat similar was the 
 suggestion of the learned Anthony Trover, in his notes to the Dabisian, i. 212. 
 
 * So Ctesias ; Spiegel: Avesta, iii. Ixxvii. So Franck : Etudes Orieiiiales, p 222. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 123 
 
 Zarathustra, — names perhaps given to individuals but 
 little known, perhaps themselves merely personifications, 
 as points of historic attachment for the religions in 
 those earlier traditions or associations from which they 
 sprung. 
 
 This generic quality of the name explains the great 
 variety of dates given for the age of Zarathustra, running 
 all the way from 6000 to 600 B.C. ;^ which has led scholars 
 to suppose that there must have been two or more of the 
 name,^ — the fact being that the name is simply messianic, 
 and employed to supply a personal centre to all obscure 
 and yet important movements in Iranian history. Assum- 
 ing (^"pitama Zarathustra to have been the chief personage 
 of the Avcstan religion, this question of his age would lead 
 into discussions that promise little satisfaction : such as 
 where Airyana-vaejo, his favorite region, may have been; 
 where Pourushagpa, his father, may have lived ; where the 
 Hystaspes or Vistagpa, whom he is said in the Avesta to 
 have converted, may have reigned.^ Two points may be 
 held as settled : First, the author of the oldest parts of the 
 Avesta cannot have been far removed in date from the 
 Vedic period, with which they are closely connected ; and, 
 second, the Greek writers* of the fourth and fifth centuries 
 before Christ could not possibly have referred him to so 
 remote an antiquity as many thousand years before their 
 own day, if he had lived in the time of Hystaspes, the 
 father of Darius I., only two hundred years previous. 
 Only later writers, many centuries after Christ, — for 
 
 1 Rapp {Zetischr. d. Deuisch. I\[orge>d. Gesellsch., xix.22); Spiegel: Eran. Altcrth. 
 i. 673; Shea's Mirkhond, 274; Plutarch's I sis and Osiris; Pliny: Natural History, xxx. 
 Anquetil-Duperron and Hyde were the first modems who adopted the latter date. They are 
 followed by Franck : Etudes Orientales, p. 213. 
 
 2 Stanley, Lives of Philosophers, counts six of the name, and of all nations. 
 
 5 See Movers: Die Phonizier, i. 259. '^2,v:Vmzor\. (Joiirnal Royal Asuiiic Society, xv. 
 245). Roth : Gesch. uns. abendldttfl. Phil. i. 349. Harlez : Preface to Avesta, i. 15. 
 
 * Xanthus of Lydia, Aristotle, etc. Haug : Lecture on Zoroaster, 1S6S. Hermippiis 
 (250 B c. ) speaks of two million verses by Zoroaster ; a pure impossibility, even in the 
 credulity of tradition, if he lived only four hundred years previously. 
 
124 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 example, all the Mahometan historians,^ — place him in 
 this Achaemenidan period.^ The extravagantly early date, 
 6000 B.C., on the other hand, is probably constructed out 
 of the Babylonian tradition, recorded by Berosus, that 
 Zoroaster was the first of a line of Median kings who 
 ruled in that city in the third millennium before Christ. 
 The number "6000" is a round number in Babylonian 
 chronology, and signifies, says Haug, " great antiquity." 
 The cosmic system of the Mazdean books places him three 
 thousand years after the beginning of the intermixture of 
 good and evil in the universe, six thousand years after the 
 creation of the earth, that is, in the middle of time ; of 
 course, a requirement of the astronomico-religious myth.^ 
 The Median magi doubtless deified Zoroaster, and identi- 
 fied him with Zrvan-akarana (Time without bounds) in 
 later times, if they did not originate this personation of 
 what in the Avcsta is simply a neuter term of relation.^ 
 The Avesta, however, gives as little reason for making 
 Zarathustra a priest-king, as for supposing him the Time- 
 fountain of Ormuzd and Ahriman. The uncertainty of the 
 whole question of Cpitama's date is indicated by the dif- 
 ferences between the almost equally valuable estimates of 
 Haug,^ Rapp,^ Duncker,' and Harlez,^ which cover a period 
 of four hundred years between the eleventh and fifteenth 
 centuries before Christ.^ 
 
 * See Rotli t Geschichte unserer abendVdnd. Phil. \. 351. 
 
 ^ The confidence with which Roth (Gesch. uns. abend. Phil. vol. i.), speaks of this date 
 shows how much has been done since his work appeared. 
 
 ^ See Windischmann : Zoroasirische Studien, p. 162. Rolh (Gesch. uns. abend. Phil., 
 1862, vol. i., 380-390) ingeniously argues that the Vistaspa of the Avestan Yashts was 
 Hystaspes, father of Darius, king of Bactria, subdued by Cyrus ; that on Darius's accession 
 to the throne of Cambyses, he made Zoroastrianism the religion of the Persian empire. 
 
 * Lenormant : Chaldean Magic (English edition), p. 229. 
 ^ Haug : Essays, etc., p. 299. 
 
 ^ Zeitschr. De7ilsch. Morgetil. Gesellsch., xix. 27. 
 ' Geschichte des Alterthmns, ii. 317. 
 8 Avesta, i. 14. 
 
 8 Windischmann, Zoroastrische Studien, pp. 260-313, gives the fullest account of the 
 testimonies of the ancients concerning the age of Zoroaster. See also Roth, as above. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 125 
 
 The nativity of the prophet is another mystery. Was he 
 Chaldean, Median, Bactrian? Here is fine hunting-ground 
 for the Bibliolaters, Christian and Perso-Arabian. Was he 
 not a servant of Jeremiah, or an associate of Noah or 
 Abraham,! qj. even of Adam?^ Whether Spiegel ^ and 
 Duperron* have better reasons for placing his birth in 
 western Iran, in contact with their favorite Semitic race, 
 than have Ctesias in ancient, and Haug,^ Duncker,^ Har- 
 lez," and Rapp,^ in modern times, for regarding Bactria as 
 his home, — certain it is that the Avesta itself, both in lan- 
 guage and geography, is decidedly an Old Bactrian work, 
 and speaks of the more occidental portions of the Iranian 
 plateau as infidel or accursed. I can see no good reason 
 for dissociating the person or the faith of Zarathustra from 
 their Vedic connections, either in place or time. 
 
 On the whole, all speculation concerning f pitama is 
 confused by the fact that the Avesta itself was brought 
 together long after its earliest portions were composed; 
 and with such an intermingling of history and tradition, 
 of legend and hymn, and prayer and formula and doc- 
 trine, that no biographical inference can be drawn from 
 any portion of its books. 
 
 The development of the Zarathustrian Idea or Faith 
 follows a similar track to that of the New Testament 
 Christ. In the earlier parts of the Avesta, Zoroaster hears 
 the revelation of Ahura as a man, as it rises upon him out 
 of the sacrificial flame.^ It is industrial and moral ; com- 
 mands agriculture,!^ and the choice between sin and right- 
 eousness, for life and for death ; denounces the Daevas," 
 their worshippers and their spells. The chosen messenger 
 
 I See Harlez : Avesta, I iS n. - Ernest de Biinsen : f/idden IVi'sdom, etc 
 
 3 Eran. Alterth.,\. 676, 684. * Avesta. Also Roth : Stud. d. abcid. Phil. i. 378- 
 
 S Essays, etc., p. 297. " Gesch. d. Alterth. ii. 315. 
 
 ' Avesta, i. 17. 
 
 8 Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgen}. Gesell. xix. ; also Rawl. Anc. Man. iii. 3S0. 
 
 9 Ya(na, xxx.: Hang. 
 
 10 Honors the Sou! of the Earth, -the Cow. i. GAtk&. " Yatna, xxxiii. 
 
126 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 of Ahura vows fidelity: " I have believed in thee. I will 
 destroy the wicked and comfort the good. Grant Thou me 
 goodness.^ I will proclaim the Best. May perfect Wisdom 
 direct me, — He whom my prayers pursue, Life of the good 
 mind and word and deed."^ He complains of desertion and 
 neglect: "Whither shall I turn? None of the shepherds, 
 none of the rulers, respect me. I am helpless. Look down 
 on me while I implore thee, Ahura, to grant the comfort 
 w'hich one gives his friend. The wicked holds the goods of 
 the just. Whoso works with righteousness in my cause, to 
 him shall be given both the earthly goods and the spiritual 
 life as a reward ; for thou possessest all, who art my assur- 
 ance."^ "To Zarathustra Ahura commits the good of the 
 world (settlements.)"'* He is the friend of Ahura, "utter- 
 ing the sacred hymns {mat/wa), the laws given by my wis- 
 dom," says the Earth-Soul.^ "It is said that to Cpitama 
 Ahura granted the best good, by reason of his sincere 
 worship, forever; and he gives the same to all who keep 
 the words and do the acts enjoined by the holy law. "^ In 
 the most of these earliest Gathas, Zoroaster is not even a 
 chosen prophet, but simply a man in earnest to seek the 
 truth and proclaim it, amidst hostile bands, at the head of 
 a few followers. But it is not easy to separate this stage 
 from that of miracle and special messianic sense, which 
 seems to have sprung directly from it. The story of his 
 temptation by Ahriman''' is believed by Haug to be an 
 ancient lyric. The Evil One recognizes that this new- 
 comer is destined to enthrone righteousness, and tries in 
 vain to seduce him from the work appointed ; but he is so 
 baffled and dazed by the Divine Word, and Zarathustra's 
 vow to fulfil it, that with the whole devil-troop he casts 
 himself down into hell ; nor does he ever become visible, 
 
 * Va(na,x\\\\.\ Haug. ' Va^na, -xXv.x Haug. 
 
 * y'ncnn, xlvi.; Haug. * Haug. 
 
 5 Va^tui, 1.; Haug. ^ J af«a, liii.; Haug. 
 
 ' yendidad, ix. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 12/ 
 
 either of himself or through them, afterwards, but works in 
 darkness and unseen. This last is probably a later feature, 
 but the temptation story itself represents a somewhat more 
 official function in the reformer than that earliest stage 
 which we have pointed out. Here we find little or no 
 ritualism, no official glory, no pre-existence, no supernat- 
 ural power. His relations are human, his interests domestic 
 as well as public ; his father's name is given as a Soma- 
 saint, and the marriage of his daughter is mentioned.^ 
 The Bundehesh doubtless goes back to this early period in 
 reciting the names of his progenitors and children, count- 
 ing three daughters and three sons, one of whom was the 
 chief of priests, the ancestor of all later Mobads. ^ 
 
 Later, the Haoma-Yasht introduces Zarathustra as con- 
 versing with the personified Sacrificial Plant; learning 
 that by preparing and offering it, the blessing of giving 
 birth to great deliverers was received by saints of old, 
 and by his own father last ; and praying that he may 
 obtain from it absolute power to go through the world, 
 destroying the evil mind.^ In the later parts of the Yagna 
 he receives the supernal formula or prayer, "which was 
 before the worlds," and whose recitation gives eternal life ; ^ 
 a Word so holy that whoever leaves out any portion of it 
 in muttering shall be cast into hell.'"^ Here Zarathustra 
 is spoken of as one of the five rulers or chiefs who are 
 placed over each "region" of Iran, — probably as priest, 
 and evidently represents the priestly authority as such. 
 
 Later still, in the Yashts, are revealed to him the twenty 
 mystic names of Ahura, and the supernatural spells for 
 averting evil.*" He is commanded to keep their mystery a 
 secret from all but the priests {Zaota).'' All the divine 
 
 ' Va(}ia. 1. 17; Hi. 3; Harlez. But Haug translates differently. Spiegel is confusing as 
 to this matter of the daughter. 
 
 ^ Bimdehcsh, xxx. ii. ' Vnena, ix. 
 
 * i'arna, xix 2, 3. ^ Vncfid, xix. 12-15. 
 
 " Ormazd-Vaskl ; Ardibahiit-Yoiht. ' Khordad-Yasht. 
 
128 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 beings and powers by whose aid men are saved, are laid 
 open to his spirit.^ The Fravardin-Yasht pronounces him 
 first of priests, warriors, husbandmen ; first teacher of 
 purity, and destroyer of Daevas ; in whom was revealed the 
 whole Word, and whom the immortals desired as lord and 
 master of the worlds ; by whose birth and growth trees 
 and streams had increase, and all creatures were made to 
 shout for joy: " Hail, fire-priest (^Athrava), Cpitama Zara- 
 thustra, born for us, to offer sacrifice for us, and spread 
 abroad the holy rite and law!" In the Hadokt-Nask his 
 words are treated as sovereign spells. Later still we have 
 benedictions {Afringa?is) on kings in his name.^ The 
 Vendidad is mainly made up of revelations to him as 
 the mediator of truth to men. It has been truly said, 
 that " no heathen religion is so distinctly stamped with 
 the idea of doctrinal revelation as this."^ 
 
 In the Vispered, Zarathustra is lord of earthly creatures, 
 as Ahura of heavenly.* The rites are all formulized, the 
 priestly functions set, the Mazdean priest is the disciple 
 of Zarathustra,^ and the services rehearse the means of 
 salvation bestowed by Mazda, by Zarathustra, and by the 
 chief of Zarathustras {Zarat/mstrdtemo) .^ 
 
 And in the still later mythology, the future saviours are 
 his descendants. The last and greatest, Sosyosh, is mirac- 
 ulously born of a virgin by his inspiration. Still the ven- 
 eration grew. Greek writers ascribed to him millions of 
 verses,' covering, according to Arabic writers, a thousand 
 ox-skins. An immense quantity of literature actually be- 
 came current as his. Suidas, Pliny, and others refer to 
 him as a great authority on natural science;^ and the Parsi 
 traditions make him the author of the twenty-one nosks 
 of the Avesta, of which but a small part remains. Pliny 
 
 ' Mihr and FravardiH-Vashts. - Haug : Essays, ^tc.,Tp. 22^. 
 
 ' Dollinger, p. 3S1. * Vispered, ii. 6; xix. 7, 8. 
 
 ^ Vis/iered, vi. 6. 6 Vispered, x. 
 
 ' See Pliny, v. 422. 8 Pliny, vi. 447, 448. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 1 29 
 
 records the story that " his brain pulsated so strongly on 
 the day of his birth as to repel the hand laid upon it, — 
 a presage of his future wisdom." ^ The Perso-Arabic 
 mythologists who have, if possible, less historic sense than 
 those of Mediaeval Christendom, have surrounded him 
 with the usual halo of supernatural phenomena, which 
 are rehearsed with spiritual Sufi interpretations in the 
 Dabistan. Torn from the womb by wild beasts, he is res- 
 cued and restored thereto by a beautiful youth, coming 
 forth from a mountain with the Word and the Branch, 
 who says to his mother, " Fear not, thy son shall be the 
 prophet of the just God."^ He laughs at the instant of 
 birth, in token probably either of triumph or good-will.^ 
 The efforts of wicked kings and magicians to destroy him 
 are thwarted by the brute creatures, to which he brings 
 relief.* He is transported like Mahomet to heaven, sub- 
 jected to supernatural bodily changes, instructed of God, 
 without mediation of angels, in all mysteries and powers. 
 The Sassanian saints of the Avestan faith repeat his mir- 
 acles,^ and the Mahometan mystics rehearse his parables 
 with transcendental exegesis.'' This idealization supplied 
 the one form of religious tribute which Iranian will-wor- 
 ship lacked ; namely, the pantheistic. The Bundehesh 
 says the Persian Mobads all trace back their lineage 
 through Zoroaster to Manuscithra.'' All the phases familiar 
 to our studies of the messianic idea in its development 
 in other religions are found in the Zarathustra legend. 
 While the older Avesta, at least, is comparatively sober 
 in its tone, the moral interest quite absorbing the theo- 
 logical and even the imaginative, and the prophet, though 
 of surpassing strength and wisdom, does not aim to vio- 
 late natural laws, but to teach the dignity of labor and the 
 holiness of truth, later tradition has carried him through 
 
 ' Pliny, ii. 155. - Dabistan, i. 216. 3 Ibid., 318. * Ibid., 220-21. 
 
 5 Dabistan, i. 304. " Ibid , i. 364. ' BundeJush, x.\.\iii. 
 
 9 
 
130 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 the whole catena of official signs. He leaves his native 
 land, goes into the mountains to prepare for his mission, 
 lives seven years in a grotto amidst mystic emblems de- 
 voted to Mithra (the type of the future cave of Mithraic 
 rites), fasts in the desert, is tempted by a personal devil, 
 walks on the sea, performs wonderful cures, and overrules 
 the elements. He withdraws to -a burning mountain for 
 thirty years ; comes unharmed out of the flames, exhort- 
 ing to faith in righteousness.^ Clement of Alexandria 
 reports from Plato, that he returned to life on a funeral 
 pile after having lain dead for twelve days.^ The mysti- 
 cal oracles, brought together and inscribed with his name 
 in the Platonic schools, have no relation to the Zoroaster 
 of the Avcsta save as indicating his ideal reputation as 
 the father of mystery and magic,^ and showing how wide a 
 field of thought and tendency the name of a far-off Mas- 
 ter of religious traditions may be stretched to cover. As 
 for Mahometan and Perso-Arabic fictions about him, — 
 from P'irdusi to Mirkhond and the Dabistan, — they have 
 no limit nor law. I select this from the Dabistan. When 
 Zoroaster was in heaven, he entreated of God, "Close the 
 door of death against me ; let that be my miracle." But 
 God said, " If I close the gates of death against thee, thou 
 wilt not be satisfied ; nay, thou wouldst entreat death of 
 me." ^ The mythical history of Zoroaster in the Avesta is 
 moulded upon earlier traditions, and fully illustrates the 
 continuity of religious ideas and forces.^ As receiver of 
 the law of Ahura, he repeats Yima (first king) and Gayo- 
 mard (first man). As Nature hails his advent, and Ahri- 
 man is struck with terror, so it was with his prototypes, the 
 
 ' See Rapp (Zeitschr d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geselhck., xix. 34). 
 
 - Clemeiu of Alexandria : b. v. chap. 14 ; Plato: Republic, B. x chap. 13. 
 
 * PHiiy. B XXX., chap. 2. 
 
 * Dabistan, i. 263. 
 
 ^ According tn Darinesteter, he comes from the old mythology of the storm-cloud. Orm. 
 et AJtrim., p. 1 ,14 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 131 
 
 former messengers of truth. In him the achievements of 
 the long Une of Fire-saints and heroes are re-enacted, — 
 of Tistrya, Verethraghna, Apam-napat, Atar, Gayomard ; 
 "he is the man of the Light hidden in the Cloud." This is 
 Darmesteter's designation of the Iranian messiahs. For in 
 all the features of the legend he discerns transformations 
 of the primitive Aryan myth of the storm-cloud, the nu- 
 cleus of Vedic inspiration also. Thus Pourusha^pa, his 
 father, "man of horses," is the " atmospheric divinity of 
 light," victorious in the elemental war. The powers that 
 assail him in his infancy are the old spirits of the storm 
 under new names. The " temptation " of the prophet by 
 Ahriman, with its sharp interchange of words, is again the 
 roar of the storm, mingling its strange enigmatic noises ; 
 only they are now in form of questions that may be re- 
 solved on penalty of death, or of replies that meet threat 
 with threat, proposal with contempt, and rage with rebuff. 
 His conversations with Ahura even, by which the law is 
 revealed, are also the direct representatives of the thunder 
 that rolled back and forth through the old Aryan heavens. 
 By this ingenious appliance of evolution, all the voices of 
 this great drama of Dualism, of whatever sort, are absorbed 
 into the primal storm-music of the " holy mountain " of 
 the atmosphere,^ as symbolic types and historic germs of 
 the Zoroastrian law.^ 
 
 Without accepting this result in all its minute details, we 
 at least recognize the law of historic derivation which lies 
 at its base. Whatever obscurity covers the personality of 
 Zarathustra, the central doctrine of his faith is traceable 
 with certainty as far back as the fifth century before 
 Christ, at which period Darius wrote the inscription,^ — 
 " Ormnzd is a great God : he made the earth and the 
 Jieaveiis ; and he created man.'' 
 
 * Vendidcid, xxii. 53. * Darmesteter : Orm. ei Ahrim., p. 207. 
 
 2 Inscription of Mount Elvend. 
 
132 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 It has been commonly supposed that the reformation 
 effected by Zarathustra in the old Aryan religion, consisted 
 in concentrating on the name of Ahuramazda the venera- 
 tion before distributed among a great number of deities, 
 especially those mentioned in the Avesta, whether as good 
 or evil powers. The most of these Avesta gods belong 
 also to the Veda, and probably, in one form or another, 
 were inherited from the older Aryan stock. ^ A like sim- 
 plification also took place in India, where all earlier dei- 
 ties were, by priestly authority and intellectual abstraction, 
 absorbed into the unity of Brahma. In the latter case, 
 however, the tendency was towards impersonality, while in 
 Zoroastrianism it was in the direction of an intenser per- 
 sonal worship. A closer resemblance may be found in 
 the change of the old Hebrew Elohiin into the distincter 
 will of Jahveh. 
 
 But there is evidently more than a mere transfer of wor- 
 ship from many gods to one God involved in the Zoroas- 
 trian reform. The Avesta describes a practical war against 
 Dacva-worshippers, — men regarded as infidels, destroyers 
 of cattle as well as souls. Their offence was, — unless the 
 Avesta is greatly misinterpreted, — choice of leaders {Kavis 
 and Karapans), who led their souls to ruin through false- 
 hood and excessive use of the Soma, not with religious 
 awe, but as an intoxicating drink. ^ A Puritan revival, a 
 practical protest in the name of conscience against the 
 degeneracies of an organized church, — if such a church 
 can be conceived of as existing among the early Aryans, 
 — would thus lie at the root of Zoroaster's dualistic reli- 
 gion of battle against wrong. But his ethical revolution 
 was also, in Hang's view, associated with the change from 
 pastoral to agricultural life ; and it cannot be denied that 
 
 1 Duncker : Gesch. d. Altertk., ii. 332; Lassen, Roth, etc. But the elements of Zoro- 
 aster are, as we have seen, in the oldest Aryan nivtbn!op:y : so that the special direction given 
 to these elements in his name it is a matter of no slight difficulty to determine. 
 
 ^ See Hang: Essays, etc., p. 290. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 1 33 
 
 this advance in social conditions has been the secret of the 
 most important steps of progress in the early history of 
 man. We hav^e already seen that Turanian nomadic tribes 
 were among the enemies of the Iranian settlements ; and 
 their connection with " Drujas " and the worship of " Dae- 
 vas " is now and then evident.^ But in Haug's view these 
 enemies of the settlement were Vedic Aryans.^ When 
 once, however, a protest of the kind suggested in this 
 theory had taken place, then a new name of deity, a 
 reversal in the estimate of the old gods, a reconstruction 
 of the traditional names and legends in the new ethical 
 interest, a fanatical intensity in the sense of personal de- 
 pendence and divine favor, religious intolerance, and a 
 warfare more or less bitter with the partisans of the older 
 belief, — in other words, the phenomena which the Avesta 
 describes, — became natural results. Nevertheless, as we 
 have already shown, many of these supposed evidences 
 of such a schism from the Vedic Aryan gods and beliefs 
 are imaginary, and the theory itself is without sufficient 
 grounds.^ 
 
 The main difference between the Vedic and Avestan 
 religions is, that in the latter the Vedic worship of natural 
 powers and phenomena is superseded by a more distinctly 
 ethical and personal interest. Ahuramazda, the Living Wis- 
 dom, replaces Indra, the lightning god ; whose war against 
 the cloud-serpent to release the fertilizing rain is supplanted 
 by the war of good-will against evil-will. But we shall err 
 if we suppose the new interest to be moral as distinguished 
 from physical. Progress is not by leaps, but by continuities. 
 The difference is that a more vigorous personal motive is 
 transfused through the same physical forces, which are no 
 less the objects of desire and fear in the Avestan prayers 
 than in the Vedic hymns ; and as the moral element is by 
 
 > Fravardln-Yasht, 38; Yagna, xi. 21. 
 
 ' Haug: Essay Sy etc., p. 293 
 
 " See chapter on The Moral Sense (Elements). 
 
134 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 no means wanting in the Veda, its absorbing power in the 
 Avesta is but the natural development of the older belief 
 that the cosmos represents in its opposing forces the in- 
 ward strife of the soul. In other words, the transition is 
 from a child-life in Nature, — fitful, susceptible, uncon- 
 scious, to the life of conscious will ; the first necessity of 
 which step is that the host of elemental powers should 
 come into relation to a Central, Creative, Inspiring Force. 
 The earnestness of the experience demands that this Force 
 should be Holiness, Justice, and Good-will. These were 
 already involved in Vedic conceptions. Varuna, undoubt- 
 edly the original of Ahura, was the god of moral as well as 
 of physical or cosmical limits. Agni must be invoked with 
 pure heart; Surya constructs or measures out the worlds, 
 from a desire to benefit men.^ But all these and other 
 powers arc held in equal honor by the worshippers, while 
 in Varuna only is the moral law strongly emphasized. A 
 great step was taken when this old Asura was enthroned 
 as the one and perfect ideal ; when the name of God meant 
 righteousness, and " purity of heart, word, and deed " be- 
 came the " Gayatri " among texts. The moral impulse is 
 more clear and emphatic in the Avesta than is the mono- 
 theistic conviction ; the reaction against polytheism can 
 hardly be called absolute. Ahura himself was not a new 
 god, or even a new name ; and his ancient laws, to which 
 the Avesta refers its own claims, are Varuna's eternal paths, 
 his all-seeing Eye, his inevitable Bond. 
 
 Ahura is the Vedic Asura who stands in the later Indian 
 hymns for a power hostile to the gods. The Asuras are 
 sometimes the robbers who hide the clouds,^ whom In- 
 dra punishes, taking their castles and cities in the sky,^ 
 whose spoils the Agvins bring from far ; ^ sometimes they 
 
 ' Rig-Veda,\. \iio-6^. 
 
 ^ Ibid., i. I ; vi. 5 (Langlois), and throughout Rig-Veda. 
 
 ^ Ibid., passim. So Yajitr-Veda, Muir, ii. 381. — 
 
 * Ibid., V viii. i. 31. (Lang'cis). 
 
ZARATIIUSTRA. 1 35 
 
 are apparently the same as Dasyus,^ low-born aborigines, 
 whom the Aryas fought as unbelievers and brutes. In this 
 sense it is erroneously supposed'-^ that the word is formed 
 from a privative and silra (god), — that is, godless being ;3 
 but this is not the original meaning of Asura, which stands 
 for the very highest form of deity, in the sense of " life- 
 possessing," " life-giving.'.' To Savitri, Indra, Varuna, the 
 title of "great Asura" is given."^ "The children of the great 
 Asura" are " the heroes who uphold the heavens." Asura 
 it is who "delivers from sins; who props up the sky, meas- 
 ures the earth, and pervades all worlds."^ These descrip- 
 tions of the Vedic Varuna might be applied with all force 
 to the Avestan Ahura. " Prajapati [lord of creatures]," 
 says the Brahmana,^ " created Asuras [living powers] with 
 his breath [asii). Therein is their Asura-nature. Having 
 created them, he regarded himself as their father; after- 
 wards he made the Pitris." Here the Asura holds a sec- 
 ondary position, but still one of honor. 
 
 Another legend hints the occasion of the fall of the Asu- 
 ras from their high estate. The Devas" and Asuras, both 
 descendants of Prajapati, inherited truth and falsehood in 
 speech. Both were alike in speaking truth and falsehood. 
 Then the Devas chose truth, rejecting deceit; the Asuras 
 chose deceit, rejecting truth. Then came war, till the per- 
 petually-invading Asuras were worsted and driven away."^ 
 This is precisely the Avesta story of good and evil powers, 
 with a change of parts. It shows also that the original 
 attribute of supreme power, at first belonging to both 
 names in common, was divided on the two, according to 
 moral distinctions, as already shown. 
 
 1 Rig-Veda, vii. vii. 4, 8 (Langlois). ^ Langlois : Rig-Veda, p. 55. 
 
 ' See Weber's Indian Literature, Eng. p. 302. Rlanu. xi. 20. 
 * Rig-Veda, i. iii. 7; i. i. v. 14; iii. ii. ix. 4: viii. v. ii. 11. 
 
 ^ Ibid., i. i. V. 14. ^' Taittir'iya Br&hm. Miiir, i. 23. 
 
 ' "The Indo-Iranian daiva, 'god,' Sanscrit rfiri/iz, becomes m 'L&'nA dacva, 'demon.'" 
 Darmepteter: Ormazd et Ahritnan, p. 265. 
 8 S' atapeiha Br akin. Muir, iv. 59, 108. 
 
136 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Even in their defeat the Asuras retained their reputa- 
 tion as the oldest and greatest of the gods. They were 
 said to have possessed the ambrosia (^Ainriia) lodged in 
 the mouth of Souchna (the magician) ; so that whereas 
 the dead Deva must remain dead, the dead Asura could 
 be restored to life. Indra changed himself into an atom 
 of honey, which Souchna ate ; and then into a bird, who 
 bore it away in his mouth. ^ If the Amrita be the same as 
 the Soma, we may connect this cycle of legends as to the 
 precedence of the Asuras to the Devas, with the claim of 
 the Avesta faith to trace back its origin to the earliest dis- 
 pensers of the Soma to mankind.^ In such passages as this 
 of the tenth book of the Rig-Veda, " the sages behold with 
 heart and mind the bird illuminated by the wisdom of the 
 Asura," we see that there was a better Vedic foundation 
 for the exalted meaning given to the name Ahura by Za- 
 rasthustra than the war of the Devas against the Asuras 
 afforded. May it not lead us back to the grand signifi- 
 cance of the word, before the Deva-worship, representing 
 a later form of religious consciousness, had become organ- 
 ized with its priesthood and rites, so as to set aside the 
 earlier and simpler conception of deity as "Living Power" 
 or "Breath"? Or did Zarathustra recur to this earlier and 
 simpler conception when he would protest against forms 
 which seemed ill in accord with its ethical contents? Many 
 such intimations in the Avesta point to the older Aryan 
 beliefs. It retains that which was probably the oldest 
 name for fire-priest, Atharvan, — since the Rig- Veda de- 
 scribes Atharvan as " the first who strengthened the gods 
 by sacrifice,"^ calls Agni his child,'* and Manu his friend.^ 
 He is even celebrated as the first deliverer of Agni from 
 
 1 Kuhn : Die Herabhiinft des Fetters und des Goiiertranks, p. 144. See Anal, of Roth 
 in Weber's Ind. Stud. iii. 466. 
 
 ' Haoma-Yasht, Vafna, ix. 
 
 * Ki'g-- Veda, viii. iv. vii. 10. See also Grihya-Sdtras, Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. 
 Gesellsch. vii. 529. 
 
 •♦ Rig-Veda, vii. vii. iii. 5. 6 Ibid., i. v. xix. 16. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 1 37 
 
 his cradle in the hollow of the wood (by friction?).^ Both 
 the Atharvans and the Angiras — probably the oldest of 
 the priestly orders known to the Vedic Aryans — are ob- 
 jects of veneration in the Avesta. The Soma, earliest of 
 sacrificial plants and inspiring drinks, is as highly exalted 
 in the one faith as in the other. 
 
 It may, then, be that the Iranian and Vedic religions, as 
 we now possess them, represent the somewhat differing 
 results of a long period of separation dating back to a 
 much earlier time than has been supposed. In this case, 
 the Zarathustra of the Avesta may, as some have sup- 
 posed, have been but one in a long line of priests of 
 Ahuramazda, many of whom were his predecessors. His 
 reformatory work may have been to give radical meaning 
 and moral power to some tribal religious schism of earlier 
 date, or to some inherited struggle against fetichistic or 
 otherwise degrading tendencies, — perhaps against the 
 raiders of barbarian Turan. 
 
 That the reformation embodied in the Avesta was the 
 work of one man is obviously impossible ; there is no such 
 claim to be found in it, Zarathustra refers his religion to 
 older times ^ and a series of antecedent revelations, though 
 none of these are represented as of equal depth and power 
 with his own. A long course of traditions and doctrinal 
 preparation for his work is implied ; and it is assumed 
 that all the divine personages and functions in which it 
 centres are familiar to his hearers. Nevertheless, the 
 vigorous protest and summons in the earliest Gathas, their 
 tone of personal assurance, the detail of private experi- 
 ences and conversations with deity, are signs of an individ- 
 ual force that cannot be mistaken. The history of the 
 Aryan schism, in which it is now by many scholars of re 
 pute believed that the religion of the Avesta was born, is 
 
 1 Langlois on Rig-Veda, iv. v. 15, 73. 
 
 ' The references to Yima, KeregSgpa, and Thraetona, as first propagators of the Soma 
 sacrifice and servants of Ahura, claim primitive authority for the law. 
 
I3S DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 not only utterly beyond our vision, but highly improbable. 
 The very name Zarathustra which embodies it, is, in part 
 at least, a generic title. But the remoteness of the spirit 
 and purpose of Ahuramazda from that of the Vedic hymns, 
 really indicates that with him we enter on a new phase of 
 historic development. A gulf opens which, while it does 
 not imply a break in the continuity of experience, yet can 
 be likened only to that which seems to occur in a personal 
 hfe, when one becomes conscious of himself, of his char- 
 acter, of his needs, of a purpose in living, and of a will 
 within him capable of fulfilling the ideal which these in- 
 spire. To explain a movement like this in the life of a 
 people, no individual priest or prophet can be held suf- 
 ficient. This call to choose between two masters who are 
 already familiar to the conscience, to whatever it may 
 refer, proves that the movement rested on a moral ex- 
 perience of the most public and social kind. The earliest 
 Gathas do not seem to be a full-formed system of faith ; 
 but they are the outburst of certain recognized and well- 
 understood elements of ideal purpose, into commanding 
 power. Whatever the immediate cause of this crisis, — 
 whether a change of social conditions, or a new relation 
 with outside tribes or beliefs, — the most that Zarathustra 
 could do was to energize and direct it as a given tendency. 
 At the time when those passages were composed, which 
 describe a social organization in which Zarathustra was 
 one of four or five chiefs of classes in each region, the 
 Iranian Church must have been fully formed. But the 
 oldest Gathas have little ecclcsiasticism as compared with 
 later parts of the Avesta. They have no genii, nor hie- 
 rarchical series of powers ; they are simply a human 
 protest against unseen powers, believed to be evil and 
 destructive, in the name of others held to be righteous 
 and preservative of body and soul.^ 
 
 ' See Harlez : Avesia, ii. 29. 
 
ZARATHUSTRA. 139 
 
 One thing is certain. In Iran there grew up what India 
 never saw, — a consciousness of world-purpose, ethical and 
 spiritual ; a reference of the ideal to the future rather than 
 to the past; a promise of progress. Yama, the Aryan 
 god of the future world, became Yima, a human ideal 
 of earthly bliss in this world; and from him downward 
 through the earthly ages flows the ever-growing stream of 
 revelation, — saviour after saviour, — to the day when all 
 evil is to be swallowed up, and only righteousness endure. 
 A motive force of ideal will had entered on its way, whose 
 impulse the world was never to lose. And this is it : that 
 the human will in its terrible struggle with Evil, its law of 
 death, in its twofold possibility and attraction in every sen- 
 sation and every thought, is yet bound for good ; that the 
 law of the universe means its deliverance and eternal tri- 
 umph ; that throughout its mighty cyclic year every depth 
 of moral night heralds the dawn of a redeeming day. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 
 
 npHE Parsi tradition that the Bible of their fathers was 
 -*- destroyed by the Macedonian, rests on no historical 
 evidence. How much of the Avestan literature has really 
 been lost, we shall probably never know. Even when we 
 have dismissed Hermippus' story that two million verses,^ 
 written on a thousand parchments, were contributed by 
 Zarathustra to human knowledge, the later claim that there 
 were originally twenty-one books or Nosks, treating of all 
 possible subjects of thought, savors too much of mythical 
 predetermination to fare any better at the hands of his- 
 torical criticism ; although the later Pehlevi writers describe 
 the contents of these Nosks,^ of which the present Avesta 
 is said to contain but one complete, with fragments of two 
 or three others, the number twenty-one is probably in- 
 vented to correspond with the number of words in the 
 holiest text of the Avesta. Much of what is lost is un- 
 doubtedly commentary on older texts. What remains is 
 made up of text, the Avesta proper, and Zend commentary. 
 It is in an extremely confused and fragmentary condition, 
 owing in part to the fact that it was gathered up and ar- 
 ranged during the storms of the Macedonian period, or 
 else after the Parthian conquerors had added their hostile 
 interference to that of the Greeks, amidst the revolutionary 
 reconstruction of Persian nationality by the first Sassanian 
 king.^ 
 
 1 According to an Arab writer. 2 See Hang : Essays, etc., pp. 1241-44. 
 
 * Third century, a.d. The Avesta was not only gathered up at this time, in all probability, 
 but translated also, in a free way, into Pehlevi (Huzvaresh), — a language largely Semitic, used 
 in the coins and inscriptions of that period, whose script appears much earlier, probably 
 
144 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Nevertheless, it seems improbable that the hands which 
 reverently sought out and brought together the precious 
 members of this long-lost literary Isis, would have made 
 much important change in the ancient form and features. 
 Subsequent political rulers of Iran, especially the Mahom- 
 etan, have probably spared these old records, written in 
 a language which they could not comprehend. What 
 influence the Semitic races of western Iran may have 
 exerted on the formation of these Scriptures, before even 
 the few fragments which have come down to us reached 
 their present state, it is impossible to say. The language 
 of the original, which some scholars have called Old Bac- 
 trian, is of great antiquity, — differing from the Vedic Sans- 
 krit only as one Greek dialect differs from another,^ and 
 mainly in consequence of phonetic changes. But the 
 alphabet in which it is now written is Semitic, its signs 
 mainly coincident with the Pehlevi, of which it seems to 
 be an expansion,^ and belongs to the Sassanian period ; 
 wliether also to an earlier period is now hardly matter of 
 question.^ But w^ierever or however first committed to 
 writing, the old Avesta had its origin in eastern Iran. It 
 regards the western regions as infidel ; it knows nothing 
 of the great cities of Persia in the eighth century before 
 Christ ; and the affinities of the language alone are decisive 
 of the question. Moreover, the Zend, the translation and 
 commentary in Pehlevi, made either by the Sassanians, or 
 found by them as a survival from Achaemenidan and 
 even probably from old Assyrian times* — could not have 
 
 even in the time of Seleucidse (Levy : Zeitschr. d. Dezitsch. Morgetil. GeseUsch. xxi. 445). 
 Perhaps signs of it appear in the Achzmenidan times. The later Pehlevi writings speak of a 
 copy of the translation of Avesta, with the Zend, as destroyed by Alexander in (the fourth cen- 
 turj' B.C.)- In the Pehlevi the Semitic words were read as Iranian equivalents. See Haug; 
 Essays, t\z. K'dnig. buyer. Akad. d. Wissen. February, iS(j9. 
 
 1 See Haug: Essays, etc., pp. 69, 70. Duncker : Gesch. d. Alterth. ii. 
 ' See BoUman : Alphabeta. 
 
 2 Compare Duncker: Gesch. d. Alterth. ii. 3S1 ; and Spiegel {Zeitschr. d. Deutsck. 
 Morgenl. GeseUsch. ix. 17S). 
 
 * Haug: Essays, etc. p. 140. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. I45 
 
 been considered as of equal authority with the original 
 Avesta; since we know^ that for liturgical purposes the 
 latter was used without translation, gloss, or comment, and 
 even without separation into books.^ This is evident from 
 the old Parsi manuscripts, from which the studies of Bur- 
 nouf, Westergaard, Spiegel, and Haug (to whom we owe 
 our real knowledge of the Avestan language) have been 
 made. 
 
 These studies have also shown that the oldest part of the 
 Avesta, the five Gathas (of which we shall speak hereafter), 
 is composed in a language evidently older than even the 
 Old Bactrian. But the difference is not so great as to 
 prevent the whole book, when separated from its Zend- 
 commentary portions, from standing by itself as a piece 
 of unquestionable antiquity. To find the joints between 
 these parts in each chapter is one of the great problems 
 of modern Avestan research, and has already been pur- 
 sued by Haug, whose exceedingly valuable translations 
 have unhappily been brought to an end by his early 
 death. ^ 
 
 The antiquity of the Avesta is shown by other evidences 
 than its language. Greek authors, from the third century 
 before Christ, down to the second century after Christ, 
 speak of the writings of Zoroaster, the hymns and sacrifices 
 of the Avesta, and even cite passages from the work. And 
 their references to religious rites and customs coincide 
 with its precepts, while the cuneiform inscriptions testify 
 to the worship of Ahuramazda;* and in all the manu- 
 
 1 Frnm the Parsi MSS. Origen, from Celsus, says the Avestan writings of Zoroaster were 
 extant in his time; also Philo of Byblos. Rapp {Xeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geselhch,), 
 xix. 35. 
 
 ^ Harlez: Avesta, i. 25. 
 
 5 The translations consulted by the author are those of Spiegel (German), complete; 
 Haug[G&xm-An and English), covering only a portion, but the most important, — more com- 
 prehensible and lyrical than Spiegel, as well as more biographical and practical, giving a hold 
 on actual life; of Harlez, an admirable French translation of nearly all, — a man, before 
 the others, of great clearnesss, candor, and learning. 
 
 * For these authorities see Harlez, i. 28-30. 
 
 10 
 
146 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 scripts, some of which are four hundred years old, and all 
 from eastern Persia, the text is substantially the same.^ 
 
 Probably, as we hav^e said, no Bible in the world is in a 
 condition so unsatisfactory to the student of comparative 
 religion or historical progress as the Avesta. The very 
 name is of uncertain meaning, though the idea of revealed 
 law, or the sum of knowledge, is evidently the main ele- 
 ment in it. That Zend is the name of a language is an 
 exploded error, and Zend-Avesta is a misleading word. 
 The Avesta is the Law; the Zend is a version and in- 
 terpretation thereof.^ According to Masudi, a heretic in 
 Persia was called a Zcndik, as adhering to a gloss instead 
 of the original Scripture.^ So the Parsi scholars say 
 Avesta and Zend ; and doubtless the best title for the Old 
 Bactrian compilation of these writings is Avestan, — that of 
 their commentary, Zend} Haug's definition of Zend, as a 
 " gnosis," would be better if the old Persian religion, even 
 in paraphrase, dealt at all in mystery or metaphysics. 
 But after all, the Zend passages, so far as they are yet 
 separated in Haug's translations, stand to the Avestan 
 chiefly in the nature of added emphasis, or cumulative 
 detail arising from the progress of the religion as an 
 institution. 
 
 But to the difficulty of separating the elements of the 
 text, and referring them to their historical order, is added 
 the still greater difficulty of determining their original 
 meaning.*^ The translator may lay his emphasis either on 
 
 1 There are portions of the text that exist oiilj in the Pehlevi ; and mixed with these 
 "Zend'' portions are others in a still later tongue (.the " Pazend," properly modern Persian 
 or Parsi), which serves as their only medium. 
 
 ■'' See Haug : Essays, etc., p. 68. Harlez : Avesta, i. 27. Whitney : Oriental Sticdies, p 171. 
 
 ^ Haug. p. 15. 
 
 ■* Zend Studies (Zciischr. d. Deuisck. Morgenl. GeseUsch. ix. 6q8). 
 
 5 Few copies are still extant. "Here is no elaborate verbal commentary, with gram- 
 matical and lexicographical resources, as in the study of the Vedas; only a translation which 
 scholars describe as equally obscure with the text it professes to explain." Spiegel {Zeitschr. 
 d. Deiistck. IMorgeid. GeseUsch. i. 244). There is also a Sanskrit translation from this by Nen- 
 osengh. See Haug : Essays, etc., 33. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 1 47 
 
 the traditional sense of the words, as determined by the 
 successive phases of Iranian experience, or on their philo- 
 logical sense, as determined by their relations with the 
 Sanskrit, the nearest sister tongue. Roth and Haug pursue 
 the latter track, Spiegel, while inclining to the former, 
 maintains that he has not neglected the other source of 
 information. The appeal of both sides to Burnouf, the 
 first great explorer of the original Avestan language, is 
 proof of the very high merit of the scholar to whom 
 Oriental studies, in every department, are immensely in- 
 debted for their actual scientific method.^ The translations 
 of Haug and Spiegel diff"er widely, as may be expected. 
 The assumption that the whole of a literature accumulat- 
 ing through a long series of ages can be taken in sum as 
 the best interpreter of its earliest products, gives Spiegel's 
 work a somewhat suspicious aspect; yet the native com- 
 mentators should doubtless receive great attention in cases 
 of very doubtful philological decision. The story of 
 Anquetil-Duperron's heroic pioneer work (1768-71) in 
 opening the Avestan literature to Europe, of its inhospi- 
 table reception by Sanskrit scholars, and the very great 
 imperfections of his French translation of these books, 
 arising from his own total ignorance of the original, and 
 even of the grammar of the Pehlevi version, which alone 
 was used, — and from an almost equal ignorance on the 
 part of his Hindu-Parsi teachers, — are too well known to 
 be referred to except by way of contrast with the far more 
 trustworthy researches of the last half-century. The real 
 help aff"orded at every stage of this progress by the merits, 
 and even by the errors, of preceding scholars, is admirably 
 
 1 The controversy on the subject of the two methods may be consulted In the Joiir. of 
 tlie German Arch. Soc. { and a full illustration of the extended confidence reposed by Spiegel 
 in the whole testimony of Iranian literature, to the meaning of the oldest monuments of it, 
 will be found in his three large volumes entitled Er&niscke A Iterthuinskunde , — a work which 
 aspires to the thoroughness of Lassen's corresponding work on India, but cannot be said to 
 equal it. The want of historical analysis and discrimination between the different epochs of 
 literary testimony seems to me to weaken its value. 
 
148 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 recognized in Hang's review of the whole history,^ — a 
 wonderful record of obstacles conquered, if not yet wholly 
 removed. This achievement had hardly reached the end 
 of its first great stage, when Roth's elaborate history of 
 the relation of Western Philosophy to that of Egypt and 
 Persia appeared in 1862, and the very imperfect and un- 
 certain data of this highly interesting work, built largely 
 on Anquetil-Duperron, are a striking illustration of the 
 immense value of those original studies of the Avestan 
 language which began with Eugene Burnouf. Behind the 
 whole lies the main difficulty, — that the books themselves 
 represent different periods in the progress of the language 
 and the faith, and are, in all probability, the work of a long 
 series of Mazdean priests and prophets. 
 
 The Bibles of the world arc all of one description. They 
 are the gradual deposits of the religious history of races, 
 reaching from the deeply covered and now scarcely acces- 
 sible strata of primitive or pre-historic times to their days 
 of superficial decay or dissolution under the influences of 
 science and ethnic communion ; formations broken up, 
 intermingled, and dislocated by the convulsions of ages ; 
 resultants of many successive reconstructions under the 
 changing moods and phases of popular belief and the 
 conscious interests of priestly schools; products of in- 
 stincts which are not so intent on giving account of them- 
 selves to posterity or to art, as on heaping together, and 
 adapting to present spiritual interests, all the words and 
 deeds available for this end that have outlived generations, 
 and borne down the precious legacy of beloved names 
 and hopes. Nothing could possibly be conceived more 
 unlike the infallibility and unchangeableness insisted on 
 by their worshippers after the canons are closed, and 
 a Bible becomes the authoritative standard of an insti- 
 tuted religion. These literary amalgams are for ages in- 
 
 ^ Literature of Parsis. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 149 
 
 soluble; serving only to deepen the equal blindness of the 
 bibliolater and the iconoclast, till scientific explorers have 
 shown the landmarks of historic construction, and referred 
 each fragment to the special tendencies of its age and au- 
 thor, known or unknown. Interpreted by these, a Bible 
 becomes at last a datum of universal history, because a 
 true picture of the entire religious and social consciousness 
 of the people whence it sprung, and whose ideal it repre- 
 sents. What Ewald and Baur and Hilgenfeld and Kuenen 
 have done for the Bible literature of the Hebrews and 
 Christians, Haug and Roth and Windischmann have begun 
 to accomplish for that of the Iranians. When thus recon- 
 structed, the sequence of parts is as natural as the growth 
 of a flower ; and how complete this metamorphosis at the 
 touch of historical science ! What man cannot do with 
 scattered stems and leaves and flowers of a plant, — restore 
 the order of growth and the living connection of the parts, 
 — he can accomplish for the Bibles which have been the 
 flowers of his past ideals after they have ceased to live, 
 and so make them capable of enduring functions, philo- 
 sophical, ethical, spiritual. The Avesta is like the rest: 
 it is a confused heap of inspirations, traditions, legends, 
 hymns, laws, minute ritual precepts, abstract categories 
 and distinctions implying some intellectual refinement, 
 mingled with outpourings of genuine religious feeling, but 
 covered up with elaborate formulas anxiously repeated, 
 and set with sentences that served for spells, — every form 
 of language by which the Iranian mind could express 
 its travail to get into right accord with Nature and the 
 conditions of human life. 
 
 The reader familiar with the imaginative riches of Hindu 
 literature, with the mystic ardor of the Vedic poets, will 
 find the Avesta, for the most part, greatly wanting in these 
 poetic elements of style. It moves in a limited order of 
 thought and topic, abounds in formulas and ritualistic 
 
150 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 repetitions, and has so much the appearance of a manual 
 prepared for religious instruction and service from ex- 
 isting materials, that one cannot help wondering if the 
 early inspirations of the Mazdean reformation, the Rig- 
 Veda of this noble faith, have been lost. Yet hymns are 
 not wanting of a high order of poetic zeal and religious 
 feeling, and a world of myth and legend is crowded into 
 these liturgical fragments, as rich as the Vedic, and as 
 thoroughly human as the Greek. 
 
 1. The Ya^na (Sanskrit, ynjTia, offering) is made up of 
 seventy sections of hymn, praise, and prayer; the "second 
 part" of which, consisting of " the five Gathas," is the oldest 
 portion of the Avesta, and is spoken of in the Avesta itself 
 as composed by Zarathustra. These arc books of metrical 
 lyrics, and biographical and doctrinal relations. Here, as 
 we have already said, is the clear and simple substance 
 of the faith, its natural and human side, the upspringing 
 of its prophetic power. They resemble in their relative 
 characteristics the Gathas of Buddhism, which, scattered 
 metrical sentences through the Statras, represent primitive 
 Buddhism, as it existed previous to its hierarchical day.^ 
 The rest of the Yagna is later and more liturgical. 
 
 2. The Vendidad {vt-dacva-ddta, law for repelling the 
 Daevas) contains twenty-two chapters (fargard) of con- 
 versations between Ahuramazda and Zarathustra, which 
 are made up of fragmentary legends of early ages (like 
 the Hebrew " Book of Origins" compiled in the captivity), 
 the myths of Yima, Thraetona. Zarathustra, etc. ; prescrip- 
 tions about agriculture, and the treatment of animals, re- 
 garded as pure or impure, and the recognition of things 
 dear to the earth, as distinct from things hateful to her; 
 rituals of purification ; efficacious prayers to all powers 
 and saints; runes for conjuring away evil powers. The 
 moral precepts are few and far between ; all exhortations 
 
 * See author's India, p. 646. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 151 
 
 arc to definite concrete acts, and little stress is laid upon 
 the motive; ethics are here absorbed in legal prescrip- 
 tions. It is the Leviticus of the dualist, for whom Nature 
 is portioned off between good and evil powers, and duty 
 consists in serving each special object according to its 
 kind. It assumes a state of society and faith in which the 
 period of moral spontaneity has passed into the period of 
 conformity and routine ; in which the prophet is known 
 only as a tradition, and the priest has gathered up his 
 garments to mingle with rite and form. 
 
 3. The Vispered is a short work, once belonging to 
 the Yagna, made up of highly ritualized invocations and 
 prayers, and sums up by enumeration the whole array 
 of visible and invisible objects for prayer and praise. 
 
 4. The Yashts (much the same in meaning as Yagna) are 
 twenty-four pieces, each in celebration of some special 
 genie, on whom is poured (as in the Rig-Veda of the Hin- 
 dus) equal honor with every other in his special Yasht, 
 showing in the fulness and utterncss of the worship the 
 tendency to bring all together into a kind of pantheistic 
 unity; at the same time, the legendary history of each is 
 rehearsed, making these Yashts the great source of our 
 knowledge of Iranian mythology and its connection with 
 the heroic ages of Iran. Here, then, we have a collection 
 something like the Homeric hymns of Greece, where each 
 deity receives highest veneration, in his own way and 
 sphere, from all creatures that live. We have Ardvt-ciira, 
 strongest of helpers, whose aid all powers at one or an- 
 other time have sought in their need or in their passion; 
 the star Tistrya, rain-bringer, and his battle with the 
 Drought, — white horse with black; Mithra, inspirer of a 
 Pindaric eloquence in the poet, who can find no limit to 
 the strength, the splendor, the all-seeing, all judging prov- 
 idence, and all-creating, all-delivering, and rejoicing en- 
 ergy of this Soul of the Sun; Orniusd, who chants to 
 
152 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Zoroaster his multitudinous names, '' coming for his help 
 and joy ; " the Feroners, exhausting every conception of 
 existence in detailed invocation of the ideal within and 
 above the natural world. 
 
 5. The Khordah-Avesta, little Avesta, containing for- 
 mulas for occasions and times, — a medley of later origin 
 than the rest, and showing an advanced institutional stage, 
 and at the same time a more elaborate enumeration of 
 moral defects and special aspirations than any other por- 
 tion. Note especially the Patets or confessions, which 
 contain all the moralities of Christianity or of Judaism, 
 mingled with the most puerile ceremonial observances, 
 as equally binding with the inward virtues. 
 
 6. But older than these ritualistic portions of the Avesta, 
 is the literature of the Sassanian revival of the fciith. After 
 the extinction of the Achsmenidan empire, native Maz- 
 deism gave way, in some degree, to Hellenism and the 
 traditions of Chaldean civilization. Under the Parthian 
 dynasty it was still further depressed, though not extin- 
 guished : the coins bore Greek legends ; the language 
 became more Semitized than before ; the Old Bactrian, in 
 which the Avesta was composed, was practically a dead 
 language, and the only familiar alphabet into which it 
 could be translated was Semitic. The Sassanian revolu- 
 tion, however, restored the native religion. A proclama- 
 tion of Khosru Parviz, a Sassanian king of the sixth 
 century, reports that efforts had been made to collect the 
 old Zoroastrian literature by princes of the Archaemenian 
 and Parthian dynasties ; ^ in which case the Sassanian re- 
 vival must have had considerable resources at hand, and 
 the acquaintance of the Persians with the traditions of 
 their faith been more or less continuous from very early 
 times. The fire-altar reappeared on the coinage ; and 
 with the renaissance of the old literature of Mazdeism 
 
 1 Haug; Essay on Pehlevi,i>. 145. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 153 
 
 came also numerous sects, born of the complex civiliza- 
 tion of the empire, — the confluence of Semitic, Greek, 
 Syrian, Christian, and Persian traditions, though it is cer- 
 tain that neither Greek nor Christian influences are trace- 
 able in any important respect in the native literature.^ 
 Partly as a result of the renewed energy of Mazdeism, and 
 partly as an effort to protect it against foreign religions, 
 arose the remarkable literature to which I have alluded, 
 only less interesting than that recovery and reproduction 
 of the older Avesta which we owe in part to the same 
 great epoch. It was composed in Pehlevi,^ the Semitically 
 written language of the period, largely constituted indeed 
 of Iranian words and construction, but containing also a 
 large Semitic element which was employed ideogram- 
 matically, and read in the corresponding Iranian.^ And 
 this linguistic vehicle lasted till the substitution of the 
 modern Persian alphabet, when the "Huzvaresh" reading, 
 as it was called, disappeared with the words to which it 
 had been applied. The oldest specimens of Pehlevi script 
 are found on the earliest monuments of the Sassanian 
 kings.* This rejuvenescence of the faith blossomed into 
 translations of the Avesta, and into doctrinal, mythical, 
 and ritualistic writings the amount of which cannot be 
 estimated. Haug has already given an enumeration and 
 brief analysis of fifty works, aggregating no less than five 
 hundred and seventeen thousand words,^ all in the inter- 
 est of the Zoroastrian revival, and indicating a very com- 
 plete sense of sufficiency to the demands of national life 
 and faith. The energy with which this abundant supply 
 of creed, tradition, and institution came to the surface, 
 
 1 Haug: Essays on Pehlevi, p. 130. 
 
 2 The word formerly designated ancient Persian in all its forms, being originally an ethnic 
 or geographical rather than linguistic designation, and transferred from the people and coun- 
 try (probably of the Parthians) to their national tongue, whatever that might be. 
 
 2 It is Haug's belief that the Avesta itself had long existed in this language. Essay on 
 Pehlevi, p. 143. 
 
 * Third century, A. D- 5 Haug: Essays, etc., p. 113. 
 
154 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 after so long a period of political suppression, is evidence 
 of great vitality, as well as grasp on the existing ele- 
 ments of future civilization. In fact, the substance of 
 this religion, as already shown, — the worship of the 
 personal will, as incarnated in the struggle of good with 
 evil for the mastery of the universe, — was inevitably the 
 nucleus of future religious development. It could not 
 be escaped ; it was indispensable to all existing forms of 
 religious and social aspirations ; and although a flood of 
 physical force swept its special name and organization 
 almost out of being, its soul passed into Mahometanism, 
 Judaism, and Christianity, to mould these new accessions 
 to the same essential purpose. 
 
 Whatever signs of borrowing from these systems may 
 appear in the Pehlcvi literature of Mazdcism are delu- 
 sive, so far as this modern religion is concerned. In the 
 vitality of personal and ethical will-worship, Mazdeism 
 was the precursor, the herald, of their glory, and its influ- 
 ence on their development was of the most decisive and 
 enduring character. 
 
 The Pehlcvi literature of the Mazdeans was not born in 
 a day. It represented a smouldering life under the ashes 
 of their desolation, from the days of Alexander to the days 
 of Ardeshir Babegan. The origin of most of these writ- 
 ings is obscure, falling either in the Parthian period, while 
 the faith was still under a cloud, or during the Sassanian 
 revival, when the whole glorious past reappeared with a 
 new inspiration, which was to glow yet again through the 
 heroic epos of the Mahometan Firdusi. Their character 
 is, to judge from the typical works now accessible to the 
 Western scholar, what might be expected from the com- 
 mingling of Greek, Syrian, Christian, Persian, and we must 
 not forget to add Chaldean, civilizations in the current of 
 that age ; but all are intensely Mazdean in their spirit. 
 A portion is analogous to the historical and prophetic 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. I 55 
 
 Judaism of the restoration under Cyrus, detailing the 
 progress and sufferings of the national faith, quarrying 
 its old traditions, and predicting its triumph. Some are 
 controversial, indicating the large toleration enforced on 
 it by the time, by careful confutation of other religious 
 systems. Some are manuals in the form of conversation 
 or instruction by its sages ; some regulative of its ritual ; 
 others explore its visionary world of future reward and 
 punishment, — like the "Aidai-Virif-Nameh," which seems 
 to stand in close connectionwith the early Christian "Ascen- 
 sion of Isaiah." The Minokhired, "Spirit of Wisdom, "sums 
 up its whole philosophy, ethics, and mythology, in the 
 light of a metaphysical speculation foreign to the orig- 
 inal religion, and contrasts it with other systems as the 
 inventions of Ahriman. 
 
 Of the highest repute is the Bundehesh, a cosmogonical 
 account of the original creation, providential history, and 
 final purification of the world ; combining the mythology 
 of the great war of Ormuzd and Ahriman with the 
 geography, astronomy, and natural history of the Parsis ; 
 marked by signs of compilation from fragments of very 
 different ages as well as religions, — some of them of con- 
 siderable antiquity,^ and some representing or completing 
 the old Avestan faith by data, especially astronomical, 
 derived from the Arabs, and in some respects correcting 
 it, — evidently interpolations, later than the Mahometan 
 conquest.^ Especially important has been, according to 
 some, the influence of Judaism.^ But the points of mytho- 
 logical difference from the old Avesta, such as the story 
 of the first human couple, with their temptation and fall, 
 
 * Haug : Essays, etc., p. 4S. 
 
 ^ Justi, the latest translator, puts it in or after the time of Firdusi, tenth century, even 
 as late as the thirteenth century. Justi relies upon these interpolations to prove very 
 late origin. 
 
 ^ Cane: L''Ancien Orietit., ii. 390. Nicolas: Doct. Rel. des yui/s, p. 300; Revue 
 Germanigue, Sept. 1S5S, pp. 467, 468, quoted in the same. 
 
156 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 and that of the successive periods of creation ; the com- 
 phcated eschatology of a destruction and regeneration of 
 the world through fire; the doctrine of several messianic 
 persons to appear at the latter day, and that of the unity 
 of the first principle as Zrvan-akarana, which is still far 
 from emphatic, since the dual powers of Ormuzd and 
 Ahriman still create the world between them, — these 
 differences are in fact natural developments of the older 
 religion of the Gathas and the Yashts, when brought into 
 close relations with the still older civilization of Chaldea, 
 to which the analogous Jewish doctrines and legends are 
 themselves, as we have seen, largely traceable. The re- 
 semblances to later Judaism point back to a common stock 
 of Babylonian traditions; while those which connect Maz- 
 deism with earlier Hebrew religion, — such as the division 
 of creatures into clean and unclean, rules of purification 
 and laws relating to the civil treatment of diseases, much 
 more striking than the later analogies just referred to, — 
 are still further removed from the probability of a He- 
 brew origin. The Pehlevi literature shows little of the 
 spiritualizing tendency of that school of Judaism which had 
 most influence in the East, — the Alexandrian allegorical 
 school of Philo. Although Neoplatonic elements from the 
 Greek school of Edessa are believed to be discernible in 
 the Minokhired, the strongly pronounced religious dual- 
 ism of good and evil principles, unknown to Judaism, 
 is maintained in Mazdeism to the last. The saviours of 
 the Bundehesh have slight analogy with the exclusive mes- 
 sianic ideas of the Jews. The Mazdean doctrine of the 
 resurrection of the body is much older than the Jewish, 
 which first appears in the Maccabean persecutions as a 
 result of the national sufferings and the messianic hope 
 expressed in the Book of Daniel.^ Plutarch has a quota- 
 tion which proves its existence in Persia in the time of 
 
 ' See M. Nicolas: Doci. Rel. des Juifs, pp. 343-377. 
 
THE AVESTA LITERATURE. 157 
 
 Alexander, two centuries previous.^ The Jewish bodily 
 resurrection, moreover, differed from the Persian in being 
 confined to the righteous ; and had probably no other con- 
 nection with it than that of being suggested, in a general 
 form, by its superiority, as a consolation and promise, to 
 the traditional Semitic belief in an unsubstantial SJicol as 
 the destiny of the soul. Nor had the Jewish doctrine of 
 resurrection of that period any resemblance to the Persian 
 faith in final salvation or conversion of the wicked, and the 
 entire abolition of evil desire. The Mazdean angelology, 
 so far from being borrowed from the Jews, furnished the 
 basis of their seven princes of the angels, and of their celes- 
 tial legions of guardian spirits ; while its demonology gave 
 them their later or malignant Satan and his diabolic legions 
 possessing human bodies and souls. 
 
 ' De /sis ei Osiris, § 47, from Theopoinptts. See chapter on " Dualism of the Avesta." 
 
V. 
 
 CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS OF THE ACCADIAN 
 AND THE ASSYRIAN. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS OF THE ACCADIAN 
 AND THE ASSYRIAN. 
 
 TT is the excellence of the physical sciences in this age 
 ■*- of their dominion, that every step of their progress re- 
 quires the continued acceptance of whatever it involves as 
 its historical antecedents. The conditioning laws are there 
 and here and everywhere, and not one can be ignored, 
 since their constant process alone supplies the materials 
 for further investigation and discovery. The materialist 
 cannot get far enough, fumbling in his plasms and solu- 
 tions by primeval details. But in the treatment of mental 
 evolution there is still a tendency to repudiate, or at least 
 to pass by, many earlier stages and conditions which more 
 palpable and current interests are supposed to have made 
 obsolete. Thus the convenience of uniformity in spelling 
 affords excuses for a phonetic reconstruction which sweeps 
 away the anatomy of language as useless, and utterly 
 discards linguistic evolution. So in national history, the 
 revolutionary passion of the Celt (a periodic access of 
 Nihilism), which in a republic is very infectious, overrides 
 all historical obligations and their resultant conditions, 
 perpetually reconstructing society out of the excitements 
 of the hour. So also we have found a Celtic contempt of 
 historic forces and necessities in much of what is called 
 " free religious thought," as well as in Christianity. In 
 fact, it has been in one way or another traditionally fashion- 
 able to think of the beginnings of ideas and institutions as 
 having only quantitative or statistical relations to their 
 actual living results ; and to count it labor well-nigh v/asted 
 
 II 
 
1 62 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 even to recover the buried witnesses, that " through the 
 ages one increasing purpose runs." This is simply to 
 construct history without philosophy. 
 
 But Nature has always her penalty for such loose utili- 
 tarian method. She tolerates no dropping of threads, no 
 contempt for the careful steps which have cost her so 
 much time and pains. When the phonetic reformer sweeps 
 away the apparent grotesqueness of our traditional spell- 
 ing, he is sacrificing also the graces of patient develop- 
 ment; he barters away the morale of linguistic art; he 
 forsakes the embodied laws of structure to gratify the 
 caprices of a perverted pronunciation which has already 
 set aside these, one and all. Social reconstructions de 
 novo simply disorganize the elements they seek to destroy. 
 Contempt for the " dead past," conceit of the creed that 
 now is master, deprives living thought of universality, of 
 sentiment, of ideal elevation, and makes a science of his- 
 torical evolution impossible, starving that sense of invi- 
 sible forces and uncalculated values which is the noblest 
 educator of man. 
 
 We are products of the past as well as of the present; 
 we are inherited fuel as well as instant fire ; creatures of 
 tradition as well as of inspiration. For all inspiration 
 springs from resultant conditions, — as the plant is rooted 
 in soil and climate, in geologic layer, and continental form. 
 This must have the largest interpretation in matters of the 
 spirit. 
 
 For it is not a fragment of the past to which we are 
 indebted ; not a person, a tribe, an epoch, or a religion. 
 We mutilate our faculties when we base science, philoso- 
 phy, or faith upon anything less than the whole process 
 of human growth. In mind, as in matter, no forces are 
 lost, though names pass and forms are changed. And so 
 we may trust Nature to keep us in mind of this, ever to 
 stir the flagging interest in the long forgotten, and prove 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 163 
 
 her dynamic atoms inexhaustible and undying. Her silent 
 mounds cover whole arsenals of invigoration and noble 
 surprise. In her dead bones she hides a prophetic quick- 
 ening for all coming time. " Let the dead bury their 
 dead " covers but half the truth. It is when a forgotten 
 thought or deed rises in new and unexpected power that 
 the soul of the living is stirred. Then the Universal proves 
 its immortality even by what seemed to have had its day ; 
 the narrow present becomes transcendental, and expands 
 beyond experience itself. Surprise and awe make us po- 
 etic and creative ; we reconstruct old beliefs, and repair 
 old defects. When Birs-Nimrud breaks the silence of 
 his centuries, and Egypt speaks from her tombs, then for 
 science, for history, for poetry, for theology, for all that 
 Nature means, from the East even to the West the light 
 shines that rounds the thought of man and completes the 
 chain of his faith. Let the scholar magnify his function 
 amidst the arrogant competitions and foolishly exclusive 
 categories of the moment, as he rolls the stones from 
 sepulchres that seemed to have buried forever the earlier 
 witnesses of the spirit of man. He also is reformer, 
 builder of the hearts and homes of ages. 
 
 Our real knowledge, according to Plato, is " reminis- 
 cence." And surely our discovery itself is but recogni- 
 tion. Our enthusiasm and wonder at every new thought 
 is in finding it already familiar, of our own race and ex- 
 perience ; in feeling at home in it, as in glad recovery of 
 what had been lost. What is the charm of history but that 
 the whispers of one's own genius have come back to him, 
 as with oceanic roll, from the deeps of humanity? A 
 mystery of multiplied personality! By these delicious 
 surprises of recognition, our own dead past becomes a 
 living light to our feet. Is it then strange that the revival 
 of a whole buried civilization should recast the whole 
 thought of the time? It is the stern reticence of Nature 
 
1 64 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 that stimulates scientific ardor to victory. So the un- 
 comprehended monuments of remote ages are closed lips 
 quivering with secrets whence all living thought awaits the 
 solution of its problems. The law that " nothing is lost " 
 becomes an inspiration. A nation, a religion, a civiliza- 
 tion which has run its course and died in its due time, 
 because it had no more to do or say but to be the soil 
 of new, higher growth, has a nobler second-life of uses 
 before unsuspected ; because the time has come for that 
 help to universal man which it held in reserve that latest 
 generations may learn, to their admonition, what they had 
 failed to allow it. The Arab in his tent under the Babel- 
 mound muses in awe on the genii and the giants that dwelt 
 on earth and raised the heaven-scaling pile. But what 
 is his dream to the magnificent piles which science has 
 evoked from this rubbish of ages, covered with records 
 that correct our religious traditions, — their very decipher- 
 ment a miracle of toil, and an epic triumph of thought ! 
 
 Say what our self-complacent Sum of all ages may, the 
 education of the human race does not detach it from its 
 infancy. The larger its culture, the surer its track leads 
 to the hidden springs of origin, — to those first lessons 
 which contain guarantees of its best. After dark ages of 
 despotism, superstition, suppression are past, comes wider 
 diffusion than ever of the thirst to read the buried history 
 of man. What universal interest in the runes and hiero- 
 glyphs, in the languages of forgotten tribes, in survivals of 
 earliest life, in the real age and structure of the Bibles 
 of races and the origins of beliefs, — in the disentombment 
 of Troy, of Cyprus, of Mycenae ! It is not simply parallel 
 to the passionate press of physical science towards primi- 
 tive forms of life ; that first impression of universal law 
 is intensified by this morning in the history of mind ; this 
 first mountain-top in the wilderness of man's exodus from 
 the dark, — inextinguishable torch-bearer even there; this 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 65 
 
 flash of magnesium light on the secrets of human history; 
 Aladdin's castle, realm of dwarfs and volcanic laboratory 
 illumined at the touch of a culture to whose perfection the 
 whole past has wrought as one man. The dust-garments 
 unrolled, the figured fragments rise as ideograph and cu- 
 neiform ; they break their long silence with far-off poetic 
 report of man's dealing with fate and freedom, that shall 
 live when the lenses and reagents that now construct our 
 physical science shall have given place to new; just as 
 the pen, itself more potent than the sword of past ages, 
 has here given way as revealer of knowledge to the 
 mightier spade. 
 
 In these resurrections that attest the conservation of 
 historical forces, that human energy which has broken 
 the spells of Nature is not so wonderful or startling as 
 the apparently human sympathy of Nature's responses to 
 its call. The hint is always forthcoming to further them ; 
 the witchhazel bends in the explorer's hand above the 
 element he needs. Key leads on to key, till the subtlest 
 combination-lock yields, and the magic of science proves 
 far more at home in the field of interpretation than did the 
 old claim of miracle to eminent domain over all secrets 
 and all obstacles. The true Sphinx's lips are ever half 
 open ; her eyes expect discovery ; for her secret is nothing 
 else than the seeker himself. 
 
 The story of a vast civilization, which has since been 
 not extravagantly called the key of human history, re- 
 corded with a careful divination, it might almost seem, of 
 its future uses, on the palaces and rocks of Mesopotamia, 
 and even on the gigantic-winged creatures that guarded 
 them, in a mosaic setting of terra-cotta and alabaster, lay 
 buried under the dust of two thousand years. The com- 
 phcated letters of the record, though cortibined out of a 
 single elementary form, the wedge, as Babylon out of her 
 tiers of brick, had so perished from memory that this mere 
 
l66 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 wedge-mark of the chisel in the damp clay was imagined to 
 be an arrow-head, holding some subtile meaning, — a na- 
 tional emblem, or even a symbol of the Christian Trinity ! 
 At the opening of the present century, Babylon and Nine- 
 veh were still " heaps ; " here and there a fragment gave 
 hints to thoughtful travellers, — Niebuhr, De Sacy, and 
 others, — that these lines must read from left to right ; 
 that the single wedge meant division of words ; that the 
 series most frequently occurring was probably of the same 
 meaning with a haughty formula of self-assertion already 
 familiar in the records of Sassanian kings. " King of 
 Kings " as a heading was the earliest of conjectures by 
 Grotefend. Note, it was the phraseology of pa'sonal 
 will and worship that first leaped into significance be- 
 fore the explorers of these monuments raised by the 
 same all-mastering element of religion in the beginning 
 of its career. 
 
 The royal inscriptions of Persepolis were in fact the 
 starting point of discovery; letter by letter the holy name 
 of Ahuramazda was spelled out, and the path of discovery 
 opened with the alphabet of Persian cuneiform. When 
 Grotefend read, at Gottingen, in 1802, the earliest aca- 
 demic essay on this form of writing, on the same occasion 
 with Heyne's description of the first discovery in hiero- 
 glyphics,^ the Zend scholarship of Lassen was opportunely 
 at hand to correct those first results. First came the dim 
 suspicion of Rich, 1820, that the huge mounds which he 
 saw from the shores of Bagdad were the ruins of Nineveh. 
 Then Botta struck the spade into Khorsabad hills, and, 
 behold ! a palace burst into view, with its royal legend in 
 arrow-head type, " Sargon, the mighty King of Assyria's 
 land." Then, at the touch of Layard, afterwards of Loftus, 
 the ancient Calah rose from the oldest of Assyrian tombs, 
 from the giant heaps of Nimrud ; and then Nineveh her- 
 
 ' Mahaffy: Proiegornena to Attcteui History, p. 175 et seg. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 6/ 
 
 self, palace after palace, with the record of her kings Shal- 
 maneser, Sennacherib, Asshur-bani-pal, — the art and sci- 
 ence and religion of races, doubling the realm of history 
 and reconstructing it by their resurrection. Then came 
 the French to fix the site of Babylon, to open up the great 
 Bel-Temple of Birs-Nimrud and the matchless glories 
 of Nebuchadnezzar's art, and restore in full figure the 
 old palaces of the ancient kings. Rawlinson, Lenormant, 
 Smith, and the interpreters followed; and the mightiest 
 achievement of modern discovery, the decipherment of 
 the cuneiform, was made possible by these inexhaustible 
 materials which have been busying the ardent brains of 
 thousands of scholars throughout the civilized world for 
 the last thirty years. It is no part of my present task to 
 follow the track of these preliminary explorations. It is 
 the significance of the cuneiform, past and to come, as a 
 factor in universal religion, as we have explained that 
 term, which confines our present attention. 
 
 In half a century the trilingual Behistun inscription, 
 transcribed and translated by Rawlinson, aided by the 
 rocks of Susa and Van, was serving a purpose as im- 
 portant as that rendered in Egyptian studies by the 
 Rosetta stone. Grotefend had divined that the second 
 and third columns were translations of the first, or Per- 
 sian: the second, that of the non- Aryan Medes, had 
 been referred by Westergaard and Norris, and more fully 
 by Oppert, to the Turanian family of languages ; ^ and 
 Layard and Botta had given data for showing the third 
 to be Assyrian. The phonetics of these two had been 
 found, not to be alphabetic like the Persian, but sylla- 
 bic, and to be mixed in a confusing way with ideographs 
 or pure picture-signs; and the complication was further 
 increased by Rawlinson's discovery that the same signs 
 
 * Altaic, according to Oppert, or Casdo-Scythic, belonging to the non-Aryan portion of the 
 population of Media. Oppert: Le Feuple et Latigue des Medes (1879), pp. 7, 8. 
 
I 68 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 were not only used, now in the one way, and now in the 
 other, but that they had ever varying phonetic values.^ 
 Then this difficulty was in part removed by the appear- 
 ance of numerous versions of the same proper names and 
 ideas on different tablets ; ^ and still further by the dis- 
 covery of hsts of syllabaries from the wonderful library 
 of King Asshur-bani-pal, seventh century before Christ, 
 opened up by Layard in the Nineveh palace in 1850. 
 George Smith's account of his prodigious labors in gather- 
 ing into connected form the Chaldean literature on these 
 tablets of Nineveh, is wonderfully suggestive of the sym- 
 pathy of Nature with the aspirations of the human mind. 
 Asshur-bani-pal, the old world-conqueror, is moved to 
 gather carefully, to arrange and entitle the records of a 
 past civilization on library shelves. What cares Nature 
 for his pains? Dust gathers over him and his palaces. 
 Nineveh is a buried dream. No miracle preserves these 
 old bits of clay, or their forgotten characters marked with 
 chisels three thousand years ago. Geological and chemi- 
 cal laws cared no more for them than for the sweepings of 
 his stables. They had gone their way well on towards the 
 dissolution that awaits all forms, when, lo ! the mind of 
 man remembers them, and comes back to claim its own. 
 The restorers are not daunted, for the light and liberty 
 that prove humanity the sovereign of Nature, the crown 
 of her laws and ends, inspire them ; and out of the very 
 shreds and patches of ruin, the old race, its genius, its 
 functions, its bearing on most religions as their cradle 
 and teacher are all revealed, passing into school books 
 and common speech. Here were at least ten thousand 
 clay tablets, — the collated law, grammar, history, science, 
 lexicography, mythology of fifteen hundred years, pre- 
 served for twenty centuries more, to solve these hard 
 
 1 Hincks: The Polyphony of the Assyrio-Babylonian Cuneiform. 
 ' Schrader: Keilinschriften u>id Gesch., p. 41. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 69 
 
 problems of interpretation : fragments broken by fire and 
 by falling ruins, and by searchers for treasure, into bits 
 innumerable, mutilated, scattered, infiltrated with water, 
 choked with crystals; yet waiting their hour, in the 
 course of historic evolution, to reconstruct piecemeal a 
 buried world of literature and religion, and to serve mod- 
 ern liberty of thought by bringing the supernaturalist's 
 Bible of Christianity into the natural chain of historic 
 cause and eff'ect. How those Assyrian world-masters 
 worked in their proud self-assertion to ends they did not 
 know, when they strove so patiently to preserve their work 
 by fixing the tablets into walls with the written side turned 
 inward; by repeating the inscription on an outer coating 
 of the tablet;^ by accumulating copies; by grammatical 
 and verbal lists to assist the reading of forms of speech 
 even then becoming extinct; by versions of important 
 documents in all the principal languages of the empire ; 
 by penalties invoked at the close of every record on any 
 future destroyer or alterer of their purport, first makers 
 of an infallible Bible text; by the permanent nature of 
 the wedge marks, still legible, after the wear of ages, by 
 the shadows they cast,^ — '' Non oinnino moriavnir" ! That 
 vast library was no word of Jahvistic Bible revelation in 
 the Hebrew tongue. " Palace of Asshur-bani-pal, king of 
 the world, to whom Nebo and Tasmit [god and goddess 
 of science] have given ears to hear and eyes to see the 
 virtues." No miracle has protected these frail tablets of 
 clay, symbols of mortality; every natural law of decay 
 has done with them after its kind; yet enough remains 
 when at last the patient restorers of Babel have come to 
 her " heaps," to refute the tale of Jahveh's curse, and 
 to make the dead dust a living soul. The palpable en- 
 croachment of desert and flood upon a narrow strip of 
 
 ' Rawlinson : A ncient Monarchies, L p. 68. 
 * Loftus: Chaldceci and SusiaiM, p. 150. 
 
7 70 DEVELO PMENT. 
 
 cultured plain could easily suggest to Isaiah the way in 
 which Babylon might become "heaps; " but what pro- 
 phet had predicted this her resurrection? 
 
 Then came the fruitful competitions of interpreters, — 
 Lassen, Burnouf, Rawlinson, Hincks,^ — and the splendid 
 track of verification which has established the substantial 
 correctness of their method.^ The Semitic character of 
 the Assyrian records, and the true pronunciation of divine 
 names, was apparent from the syllabaries ; the names of 
 kings were more or less verified by Hebrew and other 
 writings. A far greater amount of resource than had 
 sufficed for Egyptological studies came rapidly to hand. 
 In 1857 Rawlinson, Hincks, Talbot, and Oppert made 
 four independent versions of seven hundred lines ; ^ and 
 they were so similar to each other that the validity of the 
 general method was beyond dispute.* However dubious 
 
 * Grotefend's discovery of the names of three kings and a Persepolis alpliabet in 1802 was 
 so far in advance of a time when Tychsen and Miinter and others failed to deciplier these 
 monuments, that it was thirty-two years before these discoveries " could be resolved or 
 tested." Mohl's Vingi-sef>t a>is d' histoire des itudes orietiiales, i. 547. 
 
 The first researches which threw real light on the cuneiform inscriptions were not those 
 of t,ayard and Rawlinson, but those of Schultz, copies of the Van inscriptions, whose papers 
 were saved by Mohl, and urged upon the French government in a valuable report, 1S40. 
 Grotefend had proved that the Persepolis tablets contained a language of voivels and con- 
 sonants, making names and titles of Darius and Xerxes ; and then, 1S36, came Burnouf's and 
 Lassen's memoirs on Niebuhr's and Schultz's copies. Rawlinson had but one letter to dis- 
 cover. (Miiller's Preface to Mohl's Vingtsept ans d'' histoire des efiides orientales, p. xx.). 
 Mohl stirred up students and explorers, — Botta and others, — to study the three cuneiform 
 alphabets, and also Colonel Rawlinson, who possessed the one copy of the Behistun trilingual 
 (xxiv.). But Rawlinson held back. Then Flandin and Coste published their inscriptions, 
 1844. Botta's immense spoils of Khorsabad were .sent to Paris, 1845. Then Layard's 
 work, stimulated by Botta's. began, 1S46. RawUnson's translation of the Behistun appeared 
 in 1S47. When Rawlinson sent the copie; to London, Norris, the Secretary' of the London 
 Society, " could detect the faults of writing in the copies with the same certainty that a 
 Latinist could correct the faults of a Latin inscription" (xxviii.). Layard prosecuted his 
 magnificent researches at Koyunjik, published 1851 ; then at Babylon. 
 
 "Cuneiform writing had probably been invented at Babylon, transported thence to Nine- 
 veh, and applied to the Assyrian tongue ; then later carried to Ecbatana, and applied to the 
 Median tongue ; and finally adapted to the Persian at Persepolis." Mohl's Vingt-sept ans 
 d' histoire des etudes orientales, i. p. 178. It gradually became simplified, till at Persepolis 
 it was alphabetical. 
 
 * Menant: Elements d'epigraphie assyrienne. 
 
 ' Report of Oriental International Congress, 1S73, Tom. ii. p. 126. 
 
 * Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, June, 1874. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 17I 
 
 many passages are still confessed to remain, every day 
 reveals some new and positive feature of Assyrian and 
 Babylonian history; the original texts are translated for 
 the common reader in Europe and America, and their 
 testimony is transforming the Bible into secular teaching 
 even for Sunday-schools.^ 
 
 The early death of George Smith left his translation 
 of the Babylonian Genesis-legend and mythical epopee a 
 mere collection of fragments, pieced together with unveri- 
 fied conjectures; but fresh copies and surer readings are 
 fast supplying what was wanting in this and other records ; 
 the indefatigable industry of Menant, and the productive 
 genius of Frangois Lenormant, are seconded by the nu- 
 merous collaborateurs of the Society of Biblical Archae- 
 ology. Oppert, Schrader, Menant, and Sayce are bring- 
 ing Assyrian grammar into the line of exact science; 
 and as the many tracks of a great inquiry are sure to 
 converge in some adequate mind, so in the interpretation 
 of cuneiform literature, the first creative day has come 
 to its fulness in Eberhard Schrader.^ The confession by 
 this eminent Assyriologist of the many sources of error 
 to which cuneiform decipherment is still subject, gives 
 great value to his positive claims in behalf of its results.^ 
 Two extremely important conclusions may be considered 
 assured by his careful studies. The first is the presence 
 in the Assyrian column of the inscriptions, of a third 
 form of Semitic speech besides those already known as 
 the Western and Southern forms. The second is the fact 
 that the number of passages in these inscriptions in any 
 material manner confirmatory of the Biblical records is 
 very small indeed, in view of the vast amount of material 
 
 ' The Enfrlish version, as given in the Records of the Past, is recognized as on the 
 whole being the most literal and having least openings for inevitable diversities and readings. 
 Delattre : Inscriptions Hisioriques de Niiiive et de Ba-bylone, p. 56. 
 
 ^ Zeitschr. d. Dentsch. Morgenl. Gcsellsch. xxiii., xxvi. 
 
 2 Schrader: Keilinsch. jind Gesch., 1878. 
 
1/2 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 now opened ; while the unreHableness of the Books of 
 Kings and Chronicles, especially in matters of chronology, 
 is indicated by contradictions almost equal in number to 
 the confirmations. This scholar admirably says : " A 
 thousand times better that a manifest incongruity be- 
 tween the Bible and the inscriptions should be admitted, 
 than that it should be forcibly concealed cither by 
 twisting the Bible or breaking down the monumental 
 records." ^ 
 
 That what was previously known from the Bible and 
 other sources of the geography of Palestine, as well as that 
 of the neighboring countries, even to Arabia and Egypt, 
 should receive ample confirmation from the inscriptions, 
 is no more than was to have been expected.^ Other 
 matters of conspicuous interest, such as the subjection 
 of Israel to Assyria, hardly needed such confirmation. 
 On the other hand, the few references in these inscrip- 
 tions to the relations between Hebrew and Assyrian kings 
 contain many probably irreconcilable differences from the 
 Bible story. The Assyrian chronology, as contained in 
 the "eponymous lists," — of which there are many inde- 
 pendent and parallel forms, and which are not only in 
 agreement with each other, but absolutely confirmed by a 
 very credible witness, the so-called Canon of Ptolemy, — 
 for the space of two hundred and twenty-eight years, is in 
 so strong opposition to the Bible that harmonists have 
 been driven to the desperate expedients of doubling names 
 in the lists, and imagining breaks extending over nearly 
 fifty years, at the very epoch when such a violent proceed- 
 ing was least permissible.^ For, unfortunately, the chief 
 differences between the Biblical and the cuneiform annals 
 come precisely where the latter are most thoroughly for- 
 tified by the above-mentioned Canon-; namely, in the times 
 
 • Schrader: Keilimch. und Gesch , p. 93. - Ibid., pp. 87, 90. 
 
 3 Ibid., pp. 300-304. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 73 
 
 of Sargon and Sennacherib, where the variance amounts 
 to thirteen years.^ Hebrew kings^ whom the inscriptions 
 show to have belonged to the time of Tiglath-pileser (745- 
 727 B.C.), are placed by the Bible previous to his reign, 
 and made contemporary with an Assyrian king Phul, whose 
 name is not to be found on the monuments, and is irrecon- 
 cilable with the " eponymous lists," leading to the most 
 arbitrary constructions of the history of Nineveh by dis- 
 tinguished Assyriologists.3 To complicate the difficulties, 
 the Book of Chronicles ascribes to Phul what belongs to 
 Tiglath-pileser.4 There are obstacles in the way of iden- 
 tifying the cuneiform Ahabbu with the Hebrew Ahab.^ 
 Equally illustrative is the attempt to identify the Belshazzar 
 of Daniel with the Nabonidus of the cuneiform and of 
 history, recorded as the king of Babylon at the time of 
 its capture by Cyrus. This has been done by supposing 
 that Nabonidus had a son named Belshazzar, who, " as he 
 seems to be commander-in-chief of the army[?], probably 
 had greater influence than his father, and so was repre- 
 sented as king." Though no such name as Belshazzar is 
 to be found in the tablet, " it is evidently he who is meant 
 by the king's son with the army in Accad." '^ Yet the 
 allusion to the king's son, and to other officers and soldiers, 
 is of the most incidental character. 
 
 ' Schrader; Keilinsch. und Gesch., p. 344. 
 
 '^ Menahem and Pekah. So Azariah and Ahaz. 
 
 s Schrader: Keilinsch. und Gesch., p. 347- Also Delattre : Inscriptions Historiqnes, 
 pp. 64, 69. 
 
 * Schrader: Keilitisch. taid Gesch., p. 437, 441. 
 
 B Ibid., pp. 356-371- 
 
 o The differences in translations are most obvious in the readings of ideogrammes which 
 represent proper names, and may have one or another force. Thus the same God is rendered 
 by RawUnson Vjd ; by M(^nant, Bin ; and by Sayce and Schrader, Rimmon. Izdubar is a 
 name given by Smith, provisionally, for a Sun-hero whose real name has not yet been learned. 
 But there is equal difference about the meaning of the names of metals found in the inscrip- 
 tions, which is natural enough, since the same is true of the metals and precious stones men- 
 tioned in the Bible and on the Egyptian monuments. So with wild beasts in the records of 
 royal hunts, in which different translators render the same word by buffaloes, elephants, and 
 emir, rhinoceros, and wild boars. See various translations of Tigiath-pileser I. Also De- 
 lattre : Inscriptions Historiqnes, pp. 3S, 60. 
 
1/4 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 What would be of most importance for the Bible apolo- 
 gists is some confirmation, direct or indirect, of the mirac- 
 ulous dealings with which the thread of Old Testament 
 history is so thickly hung; but of this there is not a 
 shadow. The frantic endeavors of the harmonists to 
 make out of the few natural points of connection be- 
 tween the Old Testament and the Babylonian and Assy- 
 rian records what they call " confirmations of the Sacred 
 Scriptures," consist in forcing the parallelism by wild 
 conjectures in order to deduce a wholly unwarranted con- 
 clusion ; namely, that the record of the Bible, especially 
 the Genesis story, is historically true. It is further ne- 
 cessary to assume, with Rawlinson and Geikie, that the 
 Hebrew only has the original revelation, which the Chal- 
 dec has perverted. The confusion here is palpable ; the 
 agreement, were it one and much greater, would only 
 prove the antiquity of the myth among Semitic and 
 probably other nations, but by no means afford addi- 
 tional argument in favor of a historic basis, especially 
 against the researches of science. Yet this is the current 
 logic of the harmonizing apologists. 
 
 A still more perilous crack in the system is the per- 
 sistent forgetfulness or repudiation of the fact that the 
 superiority of the Hebrew Bible over every other Scripture 
 of the world, which is the objective point of their studies, 
 cannot be proved by the imperfections of the world Scrip- 
 tures as known to us at present. Thus Geikie, in his ex- 
 altation of the Bible above the inscriptions of Egypt and 
 Babylon, because it was concerned " with the cry of the 
 oppressed peoples " and the divine moral law while they 
 were busy with the self-glorification of cruel kings, though 
 true to a considerable extent, omits to recognize that the 
 literature, religious and secular, of the ancient world has 
 been mainly destroyed by Christian fanaticism and neg- 
 lect, except such references and quotations in writers like 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 
 
 175 
 
 Eusebius and Porphyry and others for polemic purposes, 
 as serve but to assure ys of their vast dimensions and to 
 us unsearchable contents. 
 
 The ethnic genealogy of Genesis gets no new indorse- 
 ment, and the names which have puzzled ethnologists in 
 its Noachic lines are as dark as ever. The monuments 
 have nothing to say of Cushites or Hamites, whose very 
 names were, it would now seem, unknown in the lands of 
 Nimrod and of Mizraim, and were obviously chosen for 
 geographical convenience, or to convey those temporary 
 tribal antipathies upon which Hebrew ethnology was so 
 largely erected. Nimrod is unknown to the monuments, 
 spite of the theory that he is to be found in the mythic 
 Merodach, and of George Rawlinson's insistence, upon 
 Biblical authority, on his historical character, and Smith's 
 pointless conjecture that he is the same with the Izdubar 
 of the Chaldean epic, because he was a " mighty hunter " 
 (as were all the Assyrian kings) and is located in Erech, 
 one of " Nimrod's cities." ^ The best authorities have 
 drawn from the tablets a mythical solution of the name, 
 as that of the Babylonian god Merodach, conceived as an 
 epic hero,^ of whose title Nimrod is the Hebraized form. 
 
 Again, the Chaldeans, — that intangible people, whose 
 haziness is well illustrated by the fact that they are men- 
 tioned in the Bible sometimes as colonists,^ sometimes 
 as priests and official soothsayers,'* and sometimes as a 
 conquering tribe from the North,'^ — are equally unknown 
 to the monuments till the ninth century before Christ. 
 Within a century they became masters of Babylon, — 
 great conquerors, laying the foundation for the over- 
 
 1 Rawlinson : Ancient Monarchies, i. 118. Smith's Assyrian Discoz'eries, p. i56. 
 - Leiiorniant : Le Deluge, p. 10. Grivel (Trans. Sac. Bib. Arch. Vol. iii., part L 
 p. 140). Sayce {Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch. Vol. ii., part i. p. i). 
 3 Genesis xi. 31 : xv. 7. 
 
 * Elaniel li. iv. 7 ; v. 7-1 1. 
 
 * Jeremiah x. 22. Habakkvik 1-6. 
 
l']6 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 throw of Assyria by aid of the Medes.^ One thinks 
 them Egyptians, who brought arts and letters to the 
 Babylonian Semites ; another makes them Cushites, who 
 retained in their language the science and literature of 
 Semitic races, with the specialty of a learned class ; ^ 
 another believes them Aryans.^ But the cuneiform tab- 
 lets seem to settle the question by describing the Chal- 
 deans as a tribe of Accadians, with which race they were 
 probably synonymous from the beginning; in classical 
 and Biblical antiquity figuring as a learned and priestly 
 class.^ But who were the Accadians? This leads us to the 
 most interesting historical results of cuneiform studies. 
 
 It seems to be from the lack of other definite sources 
 of information that most modern scholars accept the very 
 uncertain authority of Berosus, the Babylonian historian of 
 Alexander's time, as to the succession of dynasties which 
 succeeded his monstrous epoch of prehistoric kings, four 
 hundred thousand years in duration, — his Elamite or 
 Median dynasty, beginning twenty-two hundred years 
 before Christ, being one of the most recent. The Greek 
 legends of Nin and Semiramis have still less interest. 
 
 The primitive civilization of the Mesopotamian basin 
 was not Semitic, but Turanian or Ugro-Finnic. This is 
 now recognized by the best scholars, — by Oppcrt, Sayce, 
 Lenormant, and Schrader.^ A race, whose language is 
 agglutinative, allied to the Finnic, Tartar, Etruscan, it may 
 be, — at all events to the Mongolian family, — brought the 
 earliest cuneiform writing to this region,*" composed its 
 earliest annals, developed a system of magic out of which 
 
 1 Lenormant : Chaldeaji Jlfa^/c CEng. ed.), pp. 339, 340. 
 
 2 Rawlinson : Atuie7it Monarchies, vol. i. chap. iii. Smith's Bible Dictionary, — Article 
 " Chaldeans." 
 
 s Renan : Semitique Lan^age, i. 67. 
 
 * Lenormant: Essai . . . des Fragments Cosjnogoniques de Bcrose, pp. 52-53. 
 5 Rawlinson: Ancient Monarchies, i. 55! Lenormant: Chaldean Magic (Eiig ed.), 
 p. 352 ; Schrader (Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geselhjh. xxix. 49). 
 ^ Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, p. 355. 
 
CUWEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 77 
 
 came the ascendency of the Chaldees, and laid the foun- 
 dations of its mythology.-^ The Accadians seem to have 
 descended from Elam, bringing with them the picture- 
 writing from which the cuneiform was developed. Not 
 Semitic, as the Genesis table represents them, the Elam- 
 ite tribes spoke Turanian dialects, and derived the name 
 Elam from the Accadian Nunnna (Highlands), translated 
 into Semitic. They were from earliest times continually 
 invading Babylonia, where they established dynasties, — 
 2280-1270 B.C. Even down to the sixth century there 
 were wars between the two nations. From these tribes 
 came the astronomy of the Semites, who located the zenith 
 over Elam. Assyrian art also came from them. 
 
 On this race, who call themselves mountaineers (Acca- 
 dai), arose that largely Semitic-Assyrian civilization, local- 
 ized more especially in Nineveh, and known to us already 
 through its connection with the Hebrews and the more 
 or less mythical traditions of the Greeks. Whether the 
 Turanian-Accadians were preceded by a "Cephenian" race 
 of Hamitic affinities, from Egypt or elsewhere, spread all 
 over Eastern Asia, and designated in the Bible as Cushites ; 
 and whether, as Lenormant supposes, these Cushites of 
 Ethiopia, in its widest extent, placed in Genesis among 
 the children of Ham, were really the oldest branch of the 
 Semitic family, and thus serve to explain the origin of 
 that Semitic influence in Babylonia which speedily sup- 
 planted the Turanian exotics ; or whether a still earlier 
 black race was found in the country by these Hamitic 
 Semites, by coalescence with which they lost many Sem- 
 itic traits, but preserved and transmitted Semitic speech,^ 
 — are questions of conjecture on which the monuments 
 as yet throw no adequate light. The admixture of 
 Semite and Mongol is, however, distinctly marked in the 
 
 1 Sayce in the Encyclopedia Briiannica, — " Babylonia." 
 * Lenormant: Chaldean Magic, pp. 343, 345. 
 12 
 
1 7^ DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 monumental records, even in the Babylonian sculptures, 
 which are believed by Hamy to show these two ethnic 
 types. Recent Etruscan researches have revealed a type 
 similar to that which is here believed to be Mongolian, 
 lending plausibility to Taylor's theory of the Mongolian 
 origin of the Etruscans, 
 
 Cuneiform script proved as susceptible of modification 
 to meet the requirements of Western Asiatic civilization 
 as the Semitic alphabet has to serve the same purpose 
 for European. Its ingeniously varied combinations repre- 
 sented the sounds of the most differing tongues, — of 
 Turanian languages like the Susian, Median, and Chal- 
 dean; of Semitic, like the Assyrian; of Indo-European, 
 like the Armenian and the Persian. Like the Chinese, 
 which has been of equal competency for the East of 
 Asia, it was originally composed of ideographic or pic- 
 ture signs, as is proved by an inscription of this kind at 
 Susa, and by the possibility of tracing tlip process of de- 
 velopment, through phases similar to those of Egyptian 
 and Chinese systems, from the pure picture-sign to the 
 largely phonetic.^ 
 
 Not less remarkable has been the expansive force of this 
 Mongoloid family, as represented in the East of Asia by 
 the wide extension of the Chinese and of their civiliza- 
 tion, and in the West by the immense deposit of tribes 
 speaking dialects of the Altaic or Turanian type, covering 
 ancient Elam,^ Chaldea,^ Parthia,^ and Media; ^ and if the 
 "Scythians" of Justin were of the same family, as he be- 
 lieved and as is probable enough, holding possession of the 
 most of Asia for fifteen hundred years. 
 
 These analogies are of very great interest in the study 
 
 * Lenormant: Manual of A jtcieiit History cf the East, i. 434. 
 
 * This is shown by the Susian inscriptions. 
 
 * Accad or Sumir. 
 
 * Ctesias says the Parthians were Scythians. 
 5 This has been fiilly shown by Oppert. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 179 
 
 of a family of nations which has played a much larger part 
 in the history of human progress than was even suspected 
 till within the last quarter of a century. But this is not all. 
 The fact that the two great systems of writing in which 
 the chief civilizations of Eastern and Western Asia have 
 found their record, — the Chinese ideographic and the 
 Babylonian cuneiform, — were Turanian achievements, is 
 of even more striking significance. From that ethnic 
 family, which has been regarded as the most materialistic 
 and most devoted to transient and trivial matters, has pro- 
 ceeded a twofold immortality. The ideograph has been 
 developed into the enduring literary medium of a vast 
 living civilization ; the cuneiform has been the equally en- 
 during monumental record of a departed one. The ideo- 
 graph has been the ever-changing ideal of a thoroughly 
 concrete and seemingly unprogressive family ; the cunei- 
 form speedily crystallized into a changeless expression 
 of the most ardent and passionate of races, the herald 
 of progress in the Oriental world. One only almost 
 reached the alphabetic stage of writing; but both show 
 that ethics, science, literature, mythology, and religion 
 could seize a comparatively rudimentary form of the art, 
 and fill its child-like picture-moulds with their universal 
 meanings ; that intuition and faith found expression in 
 these, long before the slow processes of analytic study out 
 of which creeds and alphabets alike proceed. Both are 
 wonders of the constructive power of mind in early civ- 
 ilization ; striking instances of its evolutionary movement, 
 which can be traced back in each to the primitive picture- 
 sign, the language of creative imagination in its germ. 
 They thus bear witness to the continuity of ideal purpose 
 down the course of history. All alphabetic signs, the 
 perfected organ of human speech, were gradually shaped 
 from materials analogous to the picture-sign of these 
 Mongoloid races, who, without aid from Aryan or Semitic, 
 
1 80 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 have brought the picture-sign up to a high point of de- 
 velopment, giving it great capability of expression, as 
 well as adaptability to the needs of different races. The 
 Chinese found it competent to express more and more of 
 their concrete detail-experience by an endless intricacy 
 of strokes and figures. The Assyrians and Persians found 
 it equally capable of ideal uses, conveyed successfully 
 through endless combinations of a single constructive ele- 
 ment, the graphic wedge. Through the strictness of its 
 laws of structure, as positive in their use of the Chinese 
 pencil stroke and the Babylonian wedge as the laws of ar- 
 chitecture in their use of arch and buttress and scroll, came 
 the possibility of a change of material from mere images 
 into phonetic and syllabic signs, at the demand of sound 
 for free representation as script; and the more perfect 
 analysis of sound evolves from these the alphabet as the 
 prime organ of human culture. From the Chinese signs 
 have come several transitory alphabets of Asia, as well as 
 the more permanent alphabet of Japan. And it seems 
 probable, from recent researches as well as from the 
 myth which traces letters to Babylon, that the Phoenician 
 letters, whence the archaic Greek, and through them the 
 present European, were derived from cuneiform originals.-^ 
 Deecke, aided by Schrader and others, has traced them to 
 modified forms of Assyrian cursive, in the ninth century 
 before Christ, and undertakes to show the original names 
 of many of the Hebrew letters in the Assyrian language.^ 
 
 Cuneiform writing, then, carried the monumental litera- 
 ture of three great linguistic families, — the Turanian, the 
 Semitic, the Aryan; the first represented by the Accadians, 
 
 ' Zeiischr. d. Deuisck. Morgenl. GeselUch. xxxi. 102-116. In the same, xi. 7S-97 
 Wiittke, who derives them from simple strokes instead of pre-existing signs, allows that they 
 must have come originally from Babylon. Renan also traces them to Babylon, though not 
 to the cuneiform (Langues Seiitiiignes, i. p. 113). Lenormant's theory of Egyptian origin 
 from hieratic signs does not seem to be well sustained. 
 
 " The researches of scholars into the Cypriote inscriptions in Greek have suggested the 
 derivation of the Greek characters from the cuneiforrrL 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. l8l 
 
 the second by the Assyrians, the third by the Persians. 
 It concentrated, on the western rim of the Iranian plateau, 
 those diversities of culture by which Iran was distinguished 
 from the simpler uniformities of the far East, and which 
 form the transition to still richer unities of civilization. 
 As these three races, in succession, adopted this form of 
 writing, an increasing force of combination was manifested 
 in it; the ideographic outlines became more artistic; the 
 rectilinear strokes were changed to something like curves. 
 From the oldest Chaldean type, through Assyrian and 
 Median to latest Persian, it reached successively the three 
 great stages of writing, — ideographic, syllabic, alphabetic. 
 It was the inseparable companion of the Iranian mind, and 
 the symbol of its comprehensiveness. 
 
 The immense fecundity of the Chinese in secular, and 
 of the Mongols of Central Asia in religious literature, 
 which has been pointed out in a previous volume of this 
 work,^ prepares us to expect from the kindred race of 
 Accadians, who invented letters and recorded thought in 
 primitive Mesopotamia, evidences of similar mental activ- 
 ity. And as the basis of those civilizations was a devel- 
 oped fetichism, expressed in systems of divination, so we 
 shall not be surprised to find that the earliest cuneiform 
 reports this kind of product on an extended scale. The 
 library of Asshur-bani-pal furnishes fragments of a vast 
 Accadian work on Magic, of no less than two hundred 
 tablets, which " was for Chaldea what the Atharva-Veda 
 was for India." And here, at the beginning of Iranian 
 life, is foreshadowed the grand feature of its maturer 
 consciousness, in the inevitable Dualism of the fetichistic 
 stage of human progress. The moral problem thus early 
 stands as a division of heaven and earth between element- 
 ary powers of good and evil, surrounded by which man 
 maintains his liberty and asserts his personality by runic 
 
 * The Author's China, part ii. chap. iv. 
 
1 82 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 spells, talismans, amulets, imprecations, phylacteries, in- 
 cantations, and sacred names and formulas repeated ad 
 naiiseani, "boundary which the gods cannot pass,"' — at 
 whose bidding diseases and bewitchments come and go, 
 while spirits follow the will of each possessor of their 
 secret law. As in later Persian belief the struggle of good 
 with evil is symbolized by the relations of Light and Dark- 
 ness, so here, though in a less consciously symbolic and 
 ethical form, light and darkness are antagonists ; here also 
 the Dualism takes the form of a positive battle. The war 
 of the seven rebellious Maskim, cosmic elementary spirits 
 from the abyss, against the life of the heavens and the 
 earth, against gods and men, whose ravages the spirit of 
 Fire by aid of a divine messenger restrains, seems almost 
 a prelude to the later wars of Ormuzd and Ahriman.^ 
 Accadian hymns to the protecting deity in Fire are, as 
 translated in Lenormant and Smith, scarcely inferior to 
 those of the Avesta : — 
 
 '' Fire, supreme chief rising higli in the land ! Hero, son of ocean, 
 
 rising high ! 
 Fire, with thy pure and brilliant flame, Thou bringest light into the 
 
 dwellings of darkness ! 
 Thou decidest the fate of everything which has a name. May the 
 
 works of the man, his son, shine in purity ! 
 May he be liigh as heaven, holy and pure as the earth ! 
 Thou who chasest the wicked Maskim, who strikest terror into the 
 
 wicked heart, 
 Destroyer of enemies, terrible weapon which chasest the plague, fer- 
 tile, brilliant. 
 May the rivers and the countries rest with thee ! Expel evil from my 
 
 body." 
 " God of the house, protector of the family ! "^ 
 " May the sunrise dissipate darkness, and the evil spirit depart into 
 
 the desert ! " 
 
 ' Inscription quoted by Lenormant in Clialdean Mag-ic, p. 44. 
 
 ' Lenormant: Chaldean Magic, ■(>■ '8. Smith: Assyrian Discoveries, ip. ^(ji. 
 
 S Ibid., pp. 184-186. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 83 
 
 " Thou who curest my face, direct my hand, Light of the Universe, 
 Thou who causest hes to disappear, and dissipatest evil powers, at the 
 
 raising of my hand, come at the calls ! " ^ 
 " Illuminator of darkness, opener of the countenance (of sorrow), 
 Setter up of the fallen, supporter of the sick ! 
 Unto thy light look the great gods, and the spirits of earth all bow 
 
 before thy face." ^ 
 
 I The moral bearings of Accadian Dualism are not less 
 striking in so superstitious a fetichism as this. Smith 
 thus translates a penitential psalm : — 
 
 " O my Lord, my transgression is great : many my sins. 
 
 my goddess, my transgression is great : many my sins. The trans- 
 
 gression that I committed I knew not. 
 The forbidden thing did I eat. My Lord in his wrath has punished 
 me. 
 
 1 lay on the ground, and no man took me by the hand. 
 
 I cried aloud, none would hear me. To my God I referred my dis- 
 tress, my prayers addressed. 
 O my God, seven times seven are my transgressions." '' 
 
 Like the later Zoroastrians, the Accadians derived good 
 and evil from one source, Miil-ge, though not by con- 
 scious abstraction, but rather by inability to analyze the 
 moral sense and the cosmic elements. Curiously enough, 
 Zrvan, the name given to the later constructed Unity, 
 has been found in Berosus as mythic personification of 
 the old Turanian race, whose Mul-ge certainly prefig- 
 ures his function in the later faith.* The Fravashi, ideal 
 guardian or higher soul assi'gned to every one in the 
 Avesta, has his prototype for the Accadian faith in a 
 similar guardian, who, however, shares in the infirmities 
 of his follower.^ 
 
 The evil spirits of the Accadians, like the Hebrew, dwelt 
 in the air and desert, and took possession of the body and 
 
 * Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, pp. 179, 183. 
 
 ^ Sayce's edition of Smith's Early Babylonia, p. 24. ^ Ibid., p. 26. 
 
 * Lenormant : Chaldeatt Magic, pp. 53, 123, 205. 6 Ibid., p. 182. 
 
1 84 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 mind of man in the form of disease. The future world, as 
 described in Accadian hymns, was similar to the Hebrew 
 Shcol ; its imprisoned shades dwelt in darkness and dust, 
 with scarce a sign of feeling, yet somehow survived death 
 with a kind of consciousness, and were even sometimes 
 taken up into the company of the gods. 
 
 The instinctive anticipation on this lower stage, of prin- 
 ciples in which more advanced culture has found high 
 religious meaning, is not illustrated by the dualism of ele- 
 mentary powers alone. The Accadians had a mystical scale 
 of numbers, and saw a secret virtue in holy names. Thus 
 Seven is the number of spirits of evil (^Maskiui). But the 
 fear and the hope rise, even through the superstitions, to 
 trust in the personal will of all-pervading protective being. 
 The Supreme Name, "the secret of Hea," which he teaches 
 to his son, the mediating god, is called " The Number; " 
 and by this hidden law of the world all forces are ordained 
 and ruled. Jewish reverence for an ineffable Name in 
 Cabala and Talmud goes back, says Lenormant, to the 
 magic of the Chaldean Accadians. ^ In the popular songs 
 and agricultural maxims everything has its own fortunate 
 number. Here are the earliest " teraphim," or little fig- 
 ures of gods and animals, believed to carry the mystic 
 potency involved in their creation, and set up in the 
 thresholds and near the bed ^ as protection, foreshad- 
 owing the idolized types and images of more cultured 
 religions. The divining-rod of the Accadian magician 
 anticipates the miraculous staff of Moses, which subju- 
 gates those of the Egyptian conjurers; ^ and his arrows, 
 those which the Hebrew prophet casts for similar pur- 
 poses.* We do not here enter into the consideration of 
 the amazing fact that the main portion of that remark- 
 
 1 Lenormant: Chaldean Magic, p. 44. ^ Ibid., p. 28. 
 
 5 2 Kings, xiii. 14-19. 
 
 * Sayce's Lecture on Babylonian Literature he/ore the Royal Institute, in London, 1878. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. X -//PSS^ 
 
 able Assyrian literature, gathered into the royal library"^ ■' 
 of Nineveh, — with its great Bibles of hymns and prayers, 
 of magic, of astronomy, agriculture, mythology; above all, 
 with its wonderful epos containing those primeval stories of 
 Solar Labors, of Titan Wars, of a Flood, and of the Descent 
 of a God to the Dead, on which so much of Hebrew and 
 Greek mythology was probably built, — was translated by 
 the Semites out of this old Accadian tongue. I wish to 
 note a more important historical relation in this earliest 
 Turanian phase of the development of Iran. 
 
 Even here we find that intense direction of the religious 
 nature towards persons, as distinguished from principles 
 and laws, which is characteristic of that whole develop- 
 ment. Its primitive magic is absorbed in personal wills, 
 good and evil, to be loved, feared, or propitiated : it is one 
 endless conversation with a superhuman world of positive 
 aims, purposes, motives. And it has been noticed by 
 Lenormant ^ that Accadian magic differs from Egyptian in 
 the absence of that identification of the dead with deity, 
 which gave the risen spirit the name of Osiris in Egypt, 
 and even raised the animal world into more than a symbol 
 of eternal things. Of this pantheistic loss of the person 
 in the idea, not a trace exists in Accadian thought. Nor 
 do sacred names, formulas, truths, possess the power, as in 
 Hindu and Egyptian piety, to constrain the superhuman 
 world. The Accadian priest bowed before a superior per- 
 sonality, appealing to this in prayer, and conquering evil by 
 the intercession of other persons, such as Merodach of the 
 older hymns. The sovereign Name itself is not so much 
 a more or less abstract form of power, like the Egyptian 
 names of deity, as a positive living Will. Personal media- 
 torship begins in the old Chaldean tablets. Silik-mulu-khi,^ 
 who cures diseases, drives out demons, and raises the dead, 
 
 * Chaldean Magic, chap. vi. 
 
 * Hymns in Lenormant : Chaldeatt Magic, pp. 64, 190, 192, 207. 
 
1 86 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 by knowledge given him as the commissioned son of Hea, 
 — " giving and saving Hfe," " merciful king of heaven and 
 earth," — strikingly resembles the mediatorial saviours of 
 Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Silik-mulu-khi never 
 reached the abstract form of the Christ of the Church, 
 was not an idea, a mystic presence, an all-conquering 
 Name, a process of history, — but remained a person 
 only, endowed with beneficent functions, but absorbing 
 an analogous veneration : 
 
 " Lord, thou art sublime. What transitory being is equal to thee ? 
 Among gods, the rewarder : among gods, the hero. 
 To thee are heaven and earth : to thee are death and h'fe." 
 
 He is so evidently regarded as a personage in real life, 
 that the bibliolater identifies him with Nimrod, and the 
 scholar with Merodach. The idea of a mediator, the nat- 
 ural result of a worship of deity as personal will, is trace- 
 able, like other Semitic behefs, to a Turanian antiquity. In 
 its substance, it is precisely what we find it in the relation 
 of the Accadian through Silik-mulu-khi to Hea; namely, 
 that of one individual to a higher individual, facilitated by 
 a third. Transformed, as in Christianity, into a mystic eso- 
 teric idea of unity, drawing the mind away from concrete 
 wills to supreme ideas and principles, it loses its essential 
 meaning; and were the change but consistently and com- 
 pletely made, would lose its historic and personal basis 
 altogether, and cease to claim any, or even to admit 
 its possibility. Of this there is no hint in Accadian 
 conceptions ; nor even of that interchangeableness of 
 divine names which we find in the Veda dimly foreshad- 
 owing the unity of all gods in the impersonal Brahm. 
 Here, on the contrary, every god stands in his own dis- 
 tinct individuality, — spirits without number, inhabiting 
 natural forms, or using natural powers, but not traced 
 back to one principle or grand generalization of the di- 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 87 
 
 vine. A personal guardian invisibly attends every one, and 
 personal demons possess body and mind. A supreme 
 triad — Anu, Hea, Mul-ge — respectively rule Heaven, 
 Earth, and the Underworld ; from the last of whom both 
 good and evil spirits proceed. Even in the dark deeps 
 of Sheol there dwells a living helper, Nin-dar, slayer of 
 monsters and pests. Finnic magic, as described in the 
 Kalevala, shows a similar triad of personal rulers, a simi- 
 lar dualistic struggle of good and evil powers, with similar 
 exorcisms and spells for expulsion of demons, mainly 
 through gods of light. The religions of these kindred 
 races agree also in placing that kind of metal in which 
 each was specially wont to work under a special god. 
 Similar affinities have been sought in another race be- 
 lieved to have been of Turanian type, the Etruscans; and 
 the evidence, both as regards personal names and religious 
 beliefs, is very striking.^ The solar origin of the Accadian 
 deities and legends becomes more obvious the more they 
 are traced to their elements, revolving around the move- 
 ment of the sun through his visible and invisible paths, of 
 the upper and under worlds, of day and night, and through 
 the zodiacal signs, of which these Turanian astronomers 
 seem to have been the framers.^ 
 
 The records of this primeval civilization, which was 
 flourishing in Chaldea at least forty centuries ago, and per- 
 haps a thousand years earlier than that, have been care- 
 fully preserved. If the Semitic Assyrians who supplanted 
 the " Accad and Sumir" had done nothing else but trans- 
 late their contents from the older language and cuneiform 
 type to which they were committed into their own cur- 
 rent writing and tongue, not only preserving the originals, 
 but providing for their study the appliances of lexicon 
 
 1 Isaac Taylor in Report of Oriental I iiteruaiicnial Congress, 187^ (Triibiier). 
 ' Hymns as translated in Lenormant : Chaldean Magic ; and tlie legends as described by 
 Sayce: Lecture on Babylonian Literature before the Royal Institute in London, 1878. 
 
1 88 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 and grammar, and all with a scrupulous historic affection 
 amounting to a filial piety like that of the Chinese in these 
 matters, — they would have entitled themselves to the lasting 
 gratitude of mankind, and can never be charged with hav- 
 ing lived to little purpose. And this they have thoroughly 
 done. 
 
 The records of the old Accadian kings, from Lig-Bagas 
 of Ur down, are jejune, — mere items of temple and tower- 
 building, their names now given in Semitic, now in Tura- 
 nian.^ But their literature was preserved in libraries, 
 located in the numerous cities of Babylonia;^ and from 
 these the Semitic Assyrians not only brought the great 
 works of poetry, mythology, science, and magic which 
 they translated and studied so carefully, but also probably 
 derived their own system of free public libraries, like those 
 of Sargon and Asshur-bani-pal, into the inner working of 
 which we can look to-day with astonishment that there 
 is nothing new under the sun. The literary capacity of 
 these old Turanians is perhaps the most remarkable fact 
 in history. The oldest of epics, to which the name of 
 Izdubar has been provisionally given, is an elaborated 
 product of Accadian genius, forty centuries old, and shows 
 how early the poetic faculty of man found inspiration in 
 the great lights of heaven.^ This marvellous epic, with 
 its twelve great legends based on the twelve zodiacal 
 signs, turning their Accadian names into dramatic per- 
 sonifications, and the process of the Sun through their 
 successive mansions into labors of a mythic hero, which 
 are curiously paralleled or repeated in the Semitic and 
 Aryan forms of the Hercules myth, interweaving also the 
 lunar phases in a form which is the prototype of that 
 wide-spread cycle of myths wherein a dying god is 
 
 1 Smith: Early History of Babylon. Records of tJu Past, vo\. iii. 
 
 * Smith : Ancient History of Babylon (Sayce's ed. ), p. ig. 
 
 * See account of this epic in Sayce's Babylonian Literature ; and the poem in Smith's 
 Assyrian Discoveries (Sayce's ed.). 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 89 
 
 mourned by the spirit of love in Nature, and sought by 
 her in the Underworld, — this marvellous epic is worthy 
 to be called the cradle of mythologies, even from what 
 we already know of its contents. Another cycle of Ac- 
 cadian legends shows the perception of cosmical order 
 and law as wrung from chaos by personal Will. The wars 
 of gods against Titans in Greek cosmogony are prefigured 
 in those of Bel and Aku and Merodach against the de- 
 structive forces of Nature, and the crude abortions — half 
 beasts, half men — of chaos. How monsters of blind aim- 
 less types and demons of the dark were conquered by the 
 sabre of Merodach (lightning) ; how Tiamat, the abyss- 
 mother of this abnormal progeny, was cloven and cast 
 with her brood into the Underworld ; how the storm-Titans 
 fought in vain against the heavenly constructive lights, — 
 was a favorite theme of Accadian imagination a thousand 
 years before Hesiod wrote or Homer sung. This prog- 
 ress by the strife of orderly will against blind force is the 
 key-note of Western thought, struck so long ago on the 
 shores of the Persian Gulf, to attune the soul of man with 
 the signs of heaven. This is what the Sun meant to those 
 first watchers of his triumphant march through cloud and 
 storm and night. So the attempt of the seven storm-spirits 
 to destroy the Moon-god was probably the poetic version 
 of an eclipse.^ The waning and waxing Moon is a queen 
 of heaven descending through the chambers of the death- 
 realm, putting off her garments of glory one by one, and 
 then, divinely delivered, resuming them as she rises again 
 upon a sorrowing and pining world.^ But long before the 
 epic of Izdubar concentrated the faith of the Accadians, 
 they had uttered their penitence, praise, and prayer to the 
 gods of the heavenly bodies and the elemental powers 
 
 1 Records of the. Past, vol. v. (Fox Talbot's translation). 
 
 2 Descent of Ishtar; Schrader's translation. Also Records of the Past, vol. i. (Fox 
 Talbot's translation). 
 
1 90 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 in hymns and liturgies, the fragments of which surprise 
 us by their resemblance, in many respects, to the Hindu 
 Veda and the Hebrew Psalms. The objects of worship 
 are different; but the ascription of personal feeling and 
 will is quite as vivid and real as anything even in the 
 latter, and the mastery of Nature by these indwelling 
 powers impregnates elements and forms with a sympathy 
 as intense as that which they yield to Indra or Jehovah. 
 "The will of Silik-mulu-khi rules the heavens and earth 
 like a sword." " He commands the flower, and it ripens; 
 the sea, and it is calm." The " hero Fire clothes space 
 like a garment, presses up the hills and kindles the dark- 
 ness." " The overwhelming fear of Anu girds his path 
 in the sky." " Day is thy servant, O Istar, and heaven 
 thy canopy." The transgressor, confessing his sins in the 
 dust, and crying without help from man, " addresses his 
 prayer to his god." " The sin thy servant has sinned, 
 bring back to blessedness: let the wind carry away his 
 transgression. May thy heart, like the heart of the mother 
 of the setting day, to its place return ! " These hymns 
 must have been accumulating for centuries. 
 
 The most characteristic thing about Accadian civilization 
 is the passion for literature. In its old deluge myth, as 
 reported by the Greeks from Berosus,^ the Chaldean Noah 
 (Xisuthrus) is bidden to bury the sacred writings at Sip- 
 para, his native city, before the flood comes; and there, 
 after he has been taken up to heaven, his followers return 
 to recover them. Oannes, the fish-god from the sea-coast, 
 to whom these primitive Chaldeans ascribe their culture, 
 is expressly said to have brought them letters. Like the 
 Chinese, they invent a historic system of writing, — to the 
 West of Asia what that of China was to the East. Peace- 
 able and industrious, they meditated on the world, and 
 
 * Abydenus and Alexander Polyhistor; Lenormant: Le dehtge et V epopee Baiyloni- 
 enne, p. 8. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. Ipl 
 
 turned the results of patient observation to legend, sci- 
 ence, and song of praise. Their science, as yet in the 
 elementary stage in many respects, was at least inspired 
 by the search for causes, by the sense of continuity and 
 development in Nature ; and this far more than with the 
 Semitic races, who inherited their culture, and used it 
 mainly in the interest of supernaturalism and national 
 exclusiveness. They not only worshipped the great ele- 
 mental wholes, — the heaven, the earth, the sea, — but 
 wrought with marvellous energy at the foundations of all 
 future astronomy, agriculture, and commerce. It was cer- 
 tainly Accadian observation which began and continued the 
 great astronomical work of Sargon's library in seventy-two 
 books, inscribed in the name of Bel-Merodach as god of 
 the starry heavens, intermediate between the upper sphere 
 and the earth. Largely magical and astrological, it con- 
 tained notices of comets, conjunctions, eclipses, lunar and 
 planetary phases, cyclic returns, and even, as some suppose, 
 of spots on the sun. The Accadians were the inventors of 
 our twelve zodiacal signs, with their very names, and of our 
 great divisions of time into the year of twelve months and 
 three hundred and sixty days, and our week of seven days, 
 which they named after sun, moon, and planets, and sepa- 
 rated by sabbaths or rest-days, religiously set apart by 
 statute. They named the Milky Way the " long path," 
 and it has been affirmed by decipherers that they made 
 celestial charts, and drew lines corresponding to equator 
 and ecliptic, dividing them into degrees; and Layard found 
 a magnifying lens at Nineveh, on whose historical rela- 
 tions conjecture may well be rife.^ Fragments of agri- 
 cultural works point us to them as the industrious founders 
 of the vast system of irrigation and production of which 
 the wealth of Babylonia was the result. We have their 
 Fasti; their lists of classified animals and plants, their 
 
 1 This is carefully summarized from Sayce's Babylonia7Z Literature- 
 
192 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 geographical statistics and lists ; their labor songs and 
 maxims, their farmer's calendar, their system of ownership 
 in lands and harvests, and records of their sales and wills and 
 loans. The far-reaching commercial life of Babylon and 
 Nineveh, by land and sea, must have sprung from this older 
 civilization of industry and culture. They had an archi- 
 tecture of their own, and wrought in textile fabrics and in 
 stone. Their laws guarded the right of inheritance, of 
 private " sanctuary," secured married women's property, 
 gave the mother the highest place in the family,^ pun- 
 ishing rejection of her more severely than the same sin 
 against the father, though distinguishing against the fe- 
 male in cases of infidelity. They fine cruelty towards 
 slaves, though very inadequately.^ They strictly unite 
 Church and State ; the statutes of the land are the com- 
 mandments of Hea, to which the king must conform in 
 their traditional rights, or the nation perishes; judges are 
 placed under oaths and penalties; brothers exhorted to 
 mutual love and generous dealing in the name of the law, 
 and in the temples of the gods ; ^ and documents of loans, 
 contracts, transfers, and debts are preserved on papyrus 
 leaves as well as on stone. Here is a long advance on 
 patriarchal institutions. The free world of the West be- 
 gins to appear, singularly enough, in a Turanian race. 
 Well might this historic race dwell on the mastery of 
 chaos in their songs to creative gods of cosmic order and 
 enlightened will. On their firm foundation the religions 
 and cultures of the world were built, and every hour re- 
 veals some new root of civilization pushing through this 
 till recently unimagined soil. The far-famed learning, the 
 parent-religion of Babylon, the mysterious gift of the 
 Chaldean in all that the ancient world held worthy of awe 
 
 I E. Thomas (Jmirnalofthe Royal Asiatic Society, xi. p. i, new series). 
 
 * Records of the Past, vol. iii. 
 
 ' Ibid., vols. V. vii. (Sayce and Smith}* 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. I93 
 
 and wonder, has found at last its historic conditions; and, 
 hke all that man most venerates, testifies, with all the Se- 
 mite's prestige of miracle in its train, to the natural law of 
 evolution, to the truth that all seeming beginnings point 
 beyond themselves. 
 
 The Assyrians who transmitted this Turanian wisdom 
 illustrate the same laws. Their respectful heed to it, and 
 their patient care for its preservation by grammatical re- 
 searches, syllabaries, lists of corresponding words, was a 
 recognition of universal relations, an escape from race- 
 prejudice, surprising at so early a period. It seems to 
 lay the corner-stone of a cosmopolitanism which has since 
 conditioned the progress of civilization. In various forms 
 we shall continue to find this force of combination the 
 special gift of Iran to history. We note it here on the 
 outermost edge of that region geographically, and at its 
 remotest epoch historically, as transition of the human 
 mind to conscious progress. It is here that races suc- 
 cessively open their sympathy, — first the Turanian, then 
 the Semitic, and then the Aryan, ■ — a movement, it will be 
 recognized, of immense interest in the social history of 
 mankind. Only the wealth of modern archaeological sci- 
 ence has revealed what unimagined continuity of social 
 evolution through the sympathy of races, inspired this 
 remote antiquity, — a chaos, it had been believed, of su- 
 perstition and war. As the heart of Asshur opened to 
 receive the gift of Turan, so the Mede and the Persian 
 afterwards welcomed that of conquered Nineveh and 
 Babylon; until the aristocratic exclusiveness of the Greek 
 in culture and of the Hebrew in religion was confronted 
 by that oceanic tide of nations, that ill-compacted but 
 swarming empire of a thousand tribes, that movable Baby- 
 lon, gathered around a Cyrus or a Xerxes, to teach the 
 one race a larger synthesis of humanity, and to prepare 
 for the other a historic indebtedness which should in 
 
 13 
 
194 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 after times sap that claim of special inspiration which 
 its intense self-confidence had imposed on the civilized 
 world. ^ 
 
 Even so conservative a scholar as George Smith was 
 at length led, by his Assyrian studies, to accept the 
 conclusion that " antiquity borrowed far more from the 
 valley of the Euphrates than from that of the Nile," and 
 that " Chaldea, rather than Egypt, is the home of Euro- 
 pean civilization." ^ It is not less true, as we shall see, 
 that the Hebrew religion and records were inherited pro- 
 ducts, in very large degree, of the same soil ; and that 
 Euphrates, not Jordan, is the deepest source of Jewish and 
 Christian tradition. Renan, who has comprehended very 
 imperfectly the value of cuneiform studies, while allowing 
 that " before the entrance of Indo-European and Semitic 
 nations on the field of history, there were very ancient 
 civilizations, to which we are indebted for elements of 
 industry and a long experience of material life," adds 
 that " all this fades before such facts as the mission of 
 Moses," etc. ( !) What part has been played by these 
 older races in directing the religious life of the Jewish 
 and Christian world will be a question for our present 
 inquiry. 
 
 It is difificult as yet to determine how large a portion of 
 Assyrian culture was derived from Accadian sources. The 
 development was certainly continuous, and, even without 
 the light thrown on it by cuneiform studies, is clearly trace- 
 able to the sea-coast at the mouth of the Euphrates. It is 
 here that all ancient tradition places the earliest social, 
 industrial, intellectual life of Western Asia. Hither, as 
 
 * The Assyrian kings have left the record of their collecting, copj'ing:, and preserving of 
 the old tablets from Babylon and its numerous sister seats of learning, of their careful 
 arrangement o£ them in libraries in great Assyrian cities under minute care, and of the 
 steady growth of these libraries from the end of the ninth to the middle of the seventh 
 century before Christ. (Sayce's Smith: Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 27.) 
 
 ^ Assyrian Discoveries, p. 451. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 195 
 
 Berosus reports from Babylonian records, came the mythic 
 civilizers, — Cannes and his Annedoti, half fish, half man, 
 — at repeated intervals, to teach rude men the arts of life. 
 Whether these mystic seven represent so many sacred 
 books of an early priesthood, or whether their amphibious 
 type points to " Cushite navigators " bringing Egyptian 
 culture, or whether they are but mythic expressions for 
 the principal Accadian gods, Anu and Hea, out of whose 
 names most of their individual titles appear to be formed, 
 as well as their general appellation (Annedoti)} or possibly 
 for the Accadian Hea-khan, " Hea, the fish,"^— they are 
 at least natural types of social origin for a race dwelling 
 in the constant presence of oceanic life. The myth be- 
 longs to the great cycle, of which Dagon and Derketo, 
 Jonah, etc., are forms. The same causes peopled the 
 Chaldean chaos with sea-monsters, under the sway of 
 Tiamat, "the watery abyss," whence the gods also rise 
 and create. In the mythologies of Asia generally, "ocean" 
 means the atmospheric deep, — space mingling with sea, 
 for the mind as it does for the eye.^ In the Chaldean we 
 first hear the roar of the actual ocean, not as mere infinite 
 space, but as productive living power. There was a fine 
 presentiment of scientific truth in the old cosmogonies 
 that made the sea the parent of all things. It is here, 
 on the shore of the Persian Gulf, that Bel-Merodach, the 
 Semitic god of civilization, had his strife with the sea, as 
 primal chaotic element, cleaving her in two, and then 
 making the cosmic order from his own divided brain. 
 Similar forms of pantheistic evolution, in India and 
 Greece, produce Brahma from a dismembered Prajapati, 
 and Athene from the split brain of Zeus ; and from the 
 disseverment of a primal giant Ymir comes the Norse 
 
 1 Lenormant: Chaldean Magic, pp. 201-203. 
 
 2 Smith: Chaldean Accmint of Getiesis (Sayce's edition), p. 325- 
 
 8 Eckstein on Cosmogony of Sanchoniathon {Journal 0/ the Royal Asiatic Society, xjv. 
 XV., fifth series). 
 
196 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 universe. So strong was their sense of contrast between 
 orderly law and blind caprice, that the bridge from one 
 to the other seemed to the worshippers of Nature to re- 
 quire a tragedy of self-evolution. Its connection in Chal- 
 dean cosmogony with the sea marks, as we shall see here- 
 after, a very primitive form of this recognition of necessary 
 law. Here too were the earliest sanctuaries and sacerdotal 
 colleges, schools of astrology and mathematics.^ Here 
 was Ur, reputed home of the Hebrews, most Turanian of 
 Chaldean cities ; here Surippak, place of books ; here 
 Erech, seat of priestly culture ; here the ancestral land of 
 the Phoenicians, sea-lovers and merchants of the ancient 
 world, whose primitive world-plasm was the water, and 
 whose gods, like the Chaldean, were fish- men. Here the 
 oldest Semites mingled with earlier settlers of that great 
 Scythic race (Turanian), of which Justin says that in 
 early times they covered all known regions of Asia.^ 
 Here Bab-ilu (gate of the god) became the Semitic name 
 of an old Accadian city, Ka-Dingira (same meaning), 
 while the kings of Chaldea proper had still Turanian 
 names.^ At last "Asshur went forth and builded Nine- 
 veh,"* — the god of the nation being put for the nation, 
 and the name of the nation then used, Hebrevvwise, as a 
 personal name. And so the two cities, Semite and Semito- 
 Turanian, grow side by side for centuries of rivalry, till 
 the beginning of the eighth century before Christ saw the 
 power of Babylon broken by the great Sargonide dynasty 
 of Nineveh, which ruled as one the two greatest empires 
 of the East. The closing period of the Assyrian empire, 
 from Tiglath-pileser to Asshur-bani-pal, concentrated the 
 fruits of a civilization of fifteen centuries ; till, enfeebled 
 by luxury, and harassed by Scythian hordes, it yielded 
 to the hardy mountaineers of Cyaxares the Mede and his' 
 
 1 Lenormant : Fragm. Cosmog. , p. 220. - Justin : Historia, ii. 3. 
 
 * Lenormant : ClKudtan Magic, p. 326. * Genesis, x. ii. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. I97 
 
 Babylonian allies. Then Babylon rose again to the 
 zenith, and Nebuchadnezzar made her the heir in full of 
 all past ages. 
 
 In the light of recent researches, the statement of Op- 
 pert that the two elements of Chaldeo- Assyrian civilization 
 were too closely interwoven to be distinguished, either in 
 respect of language, manners, or worship, appears extreme. 
 But in the most important features of what we may call the 
 Iranian type of historic influence, there were certainly 
 striking resemblances between these two races. To the 
 nerve of Turanian industry corresponded that of Assyrian 
 passion for military success. Alike in Babylon and Nineveh 
 the records of monarchs are one continued boast of de- 
 votion to their ideals, whether of overthrowing kingdoms 
 or of erecting shrines. In both the ziggiirat shoots up- 
 ward its seven stages, bearing witness to the superstitions 
 of an audacity that must surely have called down the wrath 
 of a jealous God. That Turanian thirst for universal do- 
 minion under a single head, which appears alike in the 
 spread of these tribes over Western Asia to build up a vast 
 industrial empire on the Persian Gulf, in the ever-advanc- 
 ing expansion of the Chinese emperor-worshippers to the 
 opposite shore of the continent, and in the shorter-lived 
 conquests of a Tamerlane or a Genghis-Khan, has its ana- 
 logue in the boundless ambition of Semito-Assyrian kings. 
 In Asshur-bani-pal or Tiglath-pileser, scourger of nations, 
 king of kings, lord of the universe, one with heaven's host, 
 earthly image of a Semitic Asshur or Jahveh, the personal 
 will stands in its pure exclusiveness as absolute human 
 godhood, burning with a nervous. fire that consumes all 
 flesh. It is the worship of such exclusive authority that 
 impresses us in the politico-religious life of Assyria, Ju- 
 dea, Arabia, and the world-coveting and world-mastering 
 faiths that sprang from these Semitic centres ; and it was 
 inherited, in less extreme form, by the Persian and his 
 
198 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Shahan-shah. In all these the nations follow, as the 
 million ripples their tidal-wave, some omnipotent king or 
 messiah, over whom visibly or invisibly hovers his arche- 
 typal self, the winged man, whether as Ormuzd, Asshur, 
 or Jahveh, or the Christian Creator and Judge. Thus ap- 
 pears, in its instinctive might, the all-productive worship 
 of will-power, of which modern religions have been the 
 successive waves. The same tribal exigencies in these Se- 
 mitic empires created II and Bel, and Asshur and Jahveh, 
 and Arabian Allah. 
 
 The gods of Assyria are the older gods of Chaldea, with 
 the conspicuous exception of Asshur,^ who, as special su- 
 preme tribal deity, takes the place before occupied by Bel.^ 
 The kings recognize his constant, present will, and rule by 
 his dictating word, intensely sympathizing with his passion- 
 ate and jealous nature, dedicating to him their conquests 
 and monuments, palaces and temples and public works, 
 in gratitude and joy, and calling themselves, in pride or in 
 loving dependence, by his name.^ No sense of personal 
 relation with deity can be more intensely real, and none has 
 ever inspired greater enthusiasm in conquest and in work. 
 So real and human is Asshur, that Rawlinson thinks he must 
 have been a deified man, a positive " son of Shem "( ! ) * ^ 
 degree of similar communion is made possible in the case 
 of inferior gods by the energy of volition of which they are 
 all types of one kind or another. The monumental symbol 
 of Belus is the horned cap of Hea, the god of wisdom, the 
 serpent ; of Sin, the crescent or new moon ; of Shamas, the 
 
 ' According to Sayce, Asshur means the water-border (of the Tigris). According to Kie- 
 pert, ai/iura, in Darius's inscriptions, means " good or just ; " originally " even, smooth." 
 Lehrbiich der alien Geogr., p. 150. 
 
 2 Berosus in Dubois' Assyria and Chaldea, pp. 56, 57. 
 
 8 Not less than thirty-one of the thirty-nine names of Assyrian kings contain the name or 
 designation of a god, thirteen of these contain the element Asshur: 3.S Asshur-bil-nisi-su, 
 "Asshur (is) the lord of h's people;" A sshur-bani-pal, "Asshur is protector of the 
 child ; " and Buzur-Asskur, '" a stronghold (is) Asshur." Rawlinson : Ancient Monarchies, 
 ii. 248-240. 
 
 * Rawlinson : Ancient Mojiarchics, ii. 3. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 1 99 
 
 four-rayed orb, or creative sun ; of Vul, the thunderbolt ; 
 of Ninip, the winged guardian man-bull at the gate, and 
 the herculean strangler of lions ; of Nergal, war-king, the 
 man-lion; of Nebo, god of learning, the sunrise (?), or 
 the wedge, and on his statues was written " The preserver 
 of those who hear him and bless his name."^ Merodach 
 is the redeeming god, ever at hand to save and restore, — 
 the Krishna, the Buddha, the Christ, of the Assyrian. The 
 angry gods, especially Anu, stand ready to avenge them- 
 selves, to break in with flood and fire and pestilence.^ These 
 gods of human will are coupled, human-wise, with god- 
 desses. The Persian's symbol of Ormuzd, a winged war- 
 rior, with bow and lifted hand, enclosed in the world-circle, 
 was transmitted to him from the Asshur of the Ninevite 
 kings. Their symbol of growth also, the Tree with the 
 candelabra-branches, or ending upward in the pine-cone 
 or vegetable flame, has descended, by the same right of 
 human significance, in Persian fir-cone and Hebrew burn- 
 ing bush and tree of life. How these gods of the will 
 battle with monsters on the monumental walls, — strange, 
 half-human creatures, fit survivals of the Chaldean chaos, 
 but all terribly alive and instinct with evil purpose ! The 
 kings are all Nimrods, and boast their trophies in hunting. 
 They are flames of wrath, besoms of destruction ; deso- 
 lators of nations, forever on the raid. When we think of 
 Assyrian art, we think of a splendid vitality, animal and 
 human, and an intense will ; of comparative contempt for 
 mere scenery; of crude and grudging treatment of lower 
 forms of Nature ; of every quality that goes with personal 
 force, — strength, grandeur, motive power, ideal purpose, 
 dramatic sympathy with all vigorous life, earnest religious 
 abandon. Everywhere these figures spring to incarnate 
 
 ' Menant : Attfiales des Rois d' Assyrie-i'p. 128. 
 
 - George Smith : Chaldean Account of Genesis, the legend of Dibbara, pp. 125-129 ; the 
 sin of Zu, pp. 1 15-124. 
 
20O DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 life ; the very cornices are crowned with animals, the 
 scroll-patterns are tree-shoots and winged bulls. In the 
 treatment of living energy, Nimrud and Koyunjik bear 
 away the palm from Greece herself, and show little inferi- 
 ority in technical science. The horse and his rider thun- 
 dering to battle with level spear ; the resistless king, of one 
 body and soul with his rushing steeds, launching arrows 
 like thunderbolts on the foes of his god; the creatures 
 with outspread wings and eagle eyes that guard the sacred 
 tree ; ^ the firm advance and lifted hands of lower gods 
 adoring Asshur; the dying agony of the wounded lion;^ 
 the horses dropping slowly with failing knees ; the terror 
 of the wild ass, speared, and torn by hounds ;2 the oxen 
 moving towards each other with human feeling in every 
 limb;^ the guardian bulls, with open jaws and terrible 
 talons, — everything in this art is alive with invincible pas- 
 sion, with triumph or tenderness, aspiration or pain, I 
 cannot but think the exquisite lines of Rossetti, on the 
 Bull-god from Nineveh, have in them more of beauty than 
 of truth : — 
 
 "Those heavy wings spread high 
 So sure of flight, which do not fly ; 
 That set gaze, never on the sky ; 
 Those scriptured flanks it cannot see ; 
 Its crown, a brow-contracting load ; 
 Its planted feet that trust the sod : . • . 
 O Nineveh ! was this thy God, — 
 Thine also, mighty Nineveh?" 
 
 In Assyrian art, derived mainly from Babylon, begins 
 the full arch, the column, the arcade, the aqueduct, the 
 tunnel, all forms that inaugurate movement and growth; 
 immense motive force of transportation by pulley, lever, 
 roller, and by human multitudes, working as one man, — 
 
 ' Rawlinson : Aticient Monarchies, i. 366. ^ Ibid., p. 355. 
 
 * Ibid-, pp. 356-357' * Ibid-, p. 331. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 20I 
 
 all delicate forms of working art-designs of metal, as well 
 as grand sculpture in stone. It is an art that presses on- 
 ward and upward, a steady advance ; as the kings grow 
 in ability to the last, so their latest palaces are their best, 
 their last age the golden. The Assyrian ziggiirat spanned 
 the whole of being, — an observatory and a tomb ; a tower 
 ascending to heaven, a monument resting on the dead ; 
 it watched the stars above, the graves beneath ; that of 
 Babylon held the tomb of Belus, and kings were buried 
 there as gods. Egypt has been supposed to be the parent 
 of Assyrian art, because many symbols are common to the 
 two countries, — the crux, the lotus, the goddess on a 
 lion, the scarabaeus, the sphinx ; ^ but the spirit in the 
 two styles differs as a flame of fire from a pyramid of 
 stone. So intense is this creative fire, this instant will, 
 that it consumes itself in its burning. Longing for the 
 immortal, it seizes on the most transient materials. With 
 plenty of stone at command, Assyrian architecture fol- 
 lowed the traditions of Babylon, and used, to a great extent, 
 sun-dried brick. Its palaces rapidly decayed. The im- 
 pulsive rulers incessantly dismantled their own work, — 
 each sacrificed that of his predecessor to the ambition of 
 building more grandly, or else to anticipate the swift fate 
 that approached it.^ As if the mere doing was enough, 
 they set their gigantic structures on mounds of earth, 
 which gave way under their weight. We have here the 
 grandest testimony to that filiation of races, that conti- 
 nuity of historic growth, which is the inspiration of mod- 
 ern science, and has dispelled the superstitions of special, 
 positive religions. Crete, Cyprus, and Sicily, Mycena; 
 and Ilion and Corinth, the isles of the Aegean and the 
 shores of Asia Minor every day reveal new evidences that 
 the art as well as the mythology of the classic world was 
 
 1 Layard ; Nineveh and its Remaitis, ii. 170, 174. 
 
 2 Rawlinson: Aiuieut Monarciiics, i, 336. 
 
202 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 to a large degree an evolution of Assyrian ages. The old 
 Cabiri of Samothrace, the Sphinx, the horned Venus of 
 the recent excavations in Greece, the finely carved cylinders 
 and castings of amulets and seals may be traced across the 
 Ionian Sea to these cradles of thought and work. 
 
 What a comment it is on the passionate self-will em- 
 bodied in king-worship that so little has come down to 
 us of domestic architecture or popular amusement! The 
 people are there on the monuments; they are bringing 
 tributes, drawing colossal bulls to the temples, hurled from 
 the battlements of a besieged city, or shot down by royal 
 arrows : in various ways they are carrying out the instant 
 will of their kings. But hardly more truly so than in the 
 long ages of modern civilization that have succeeded the 
 monarchies of Asia. We must not suppose them ciphers. 
 They do not show the merely conventional uniformity of 
 the Egyptian masses; but more of individual life is rep- 
 resented, as of those who shared the spirit of achievement 
 that leads or drives them on, — and this, though the feel- 
 ings of family affection are not expressed as in Egypt. 
 The main themes of the inscriptions are campaigns and 
 trophies ; but all the products of the Orient are figured 
 there, and prove a stirring world of industry and trade. 
 Hammurabi, Tiglath-pileser, and Sennacherib boast great 
 works of irrigation, " for the good of the people," helps 
 to their agriculture. Assyrian productive labor must have 
 followed in the Chaldean track. When Sargon says he 
 has cleared forests, opened canals, dug wells, and spread 
 fertility,^ the claim involves labor of the masses for their 
 own advantage as well as for his glory. The people of 
 Nineveh in the sev^enth century before Christ traded from 
 India in the East to Tartessus in the West.^ Records are 
 extant of private contracts, and even of private banking 
 
 ^ Menant : Annales des Rois d'' Assyrie, p. loo- 
 ^ See Sayce : Babylonian Literature, p. 50. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 203 
 
 houses.^ The library of Asshur-bani-pal alone contained 
 a greater amount of writing than all the monuments of 
 Egypt, says Layard.^ However this may be, it must have 
 employed thousands of scribes, whose art of preserving 
 records was itself a mark of popular civilization and es- 
 tablished industrial culture. So were the provisions we 
 find made for security of contracts and their registration.'^ 
 That kings and people were mere voluptuaries is a He- 
 brew slander, utterly without evidence. A nation that 
 maintained for nearly ten centuries a constantly advanc- 
 ing life of literary, military, and industrial power may be 
 said to have burnt itself out in the fire of its own aspira- 
 tions, but is surely no subject for our commonplaces on 
 the fall of empires through luxury or depravity. Empires 
 perish when destructive external forces are too strong for 
 their inward force of self-preservation. It was the inva- 
 sion of Assyria by Scythian hordes in the sixth century 
 that gave her the decisive blow ; which was only followed 
 up by Cyaxares and his Medes. There was somewhat 
 beyond the Semite in Assyrian culture, especially indus- 
 trial culture. No other people of this race, — Hebrew, 
 Arab, Canaanite, — showed such gifts ; even the Phoeni- 
 cians and their African colonies were carriers of products, 
 rather than creators. In fact, what we see in this civiliza- 
 tion is the wonderful fusion of an older Turanian mental 
 industry and material constructiveness, shown in the build- 
 ings at Babylon, with Semitic passion and will. Both ideal 
 and concrete elements were already provided in Chaldean 
 forms; and to these were now supplied the nerve-con- 
 ductors that could bring the one to bear on the other in 
 a magnificent outburst of personal Will, lasting nearly a 
 millennium, and taking tribute from hosts of kings. 
 
 ' George Smith: Babylonian Literature, p. 51. 
 
 ^ Discoveries among tlie Ruins of Ni>ici>eh and Babylon, p. 347. 
 
 ^ Lenormant: Ancient History of the East, i. 424. 
 
204 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Nor is this national persistence explicable from the 
 Semitic side. The Semite is unfitted for success in po- 
 litical construction. Arbitrary, capricious, impulsive, he 
 is incapable of giving substantial existence to the State, 
 of instituting law as independent of instant overruling 
 wills. Semitic Assyria herself had this imperfection. 
 The empire of the Sargonides was a " mere congeries " 
 of States, so loosely joined that revolt was incessant, and 
 the main business of the kings was punishing their sub- 
 jects for refusing tribute, conquering rivals, deporting 
 multitudes, extirpating rebellious dynasties. Shalmaneser 
 made thirty-one expeditions for these and similar objects 
 in as many years. Subject States for the most part re- 
 tained their local institutions and gods. Centralization, 
 except such as could be effected by royal governors, with 
 ill-detined powers, was beyond these children of passionate 
 desire. What military prowess and wild enthusiasm could 
 do, Semitism accomplished; but other elements, more 
 suited to culture and combination, were required to sup- 
 plement and counterbalance them, — and these were prob- 
 ably of Turanian origin. Tiglath-pileser boasts that he 
 brought forty-two countries, from the rising to the setting 
 sun, under one government and one religion. The trade, 
 science, art, literature, industry, that drew all interests of 
 nations to centre in Nineveh and Babylon, was rooted in 
 forces older than the Semitic conqueror, and destined to 
 outlast him. 
 
 The Assyrian kings absorbed all personalities, suffered 
 no humble emotions or popular expressions on the great 
 monuments of their reigns, were gods on earth, whose 
 physiognomy changed not from age to age, and whose 
 immortality permitted no record of their crimes or defeats. 
 Their " reigns were glorified by official scribes in formu- 
 las of great ambiguity, doubtless largely of mythic con- 
 struction and accepted fiction;" but they were not mere 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 20$ 
 
 scourges of mankind. Sennacherib calls himself "one who 
 keeps his oath, guardian of the laws, follower of justice ; " 
 glories in opening springs for the people to own, and 
 making aqueducts and water-wheels, and streets splen- 
 did as the sun.^ Sargon's palace, built in the eighth cen- 
 tury before Christ, must have been the finest piece of 
 architecture then existing. Asshur-nazir-pal, in the pre- 
 vious century, inscribed upon his, the noblest work of the 
 kind by far then achieved, the prayer, " May this my seat 
 of power endure forever,"^ They are great, heroic hun- 
 ters, destroying on a vast scale the wild beasts that in 
 their times encroached on the security of the land and 
 its labors ; and they boast of this as they do of victories 
 over empires Asshur-bani-pal is " strengthener of the 
 people," and " wars against oppressors." Esarhaddon 
 gathers "the people on lofty seats, and feasts them with 
 the gods." ^ Even Tiglath-pileser I. " has mercy on 
 those who submit," and boasts of " improving the con- 
 dition of his subjects, and obtaining for them security 
 and plenty."* At home there seem to have been few 
 or no revolutions; of popular ones not one is mentioned. 
 Sargon not only allows the towns to follow their an- 
 cient ways,'^ but even rectifies the institutions which they 
 did not like, and encourages their priests to free dis- 
 cussion.^ Asshur-bani-pal engraves his moral obligations 
 on tablets, and erects them in his palace for public in- 
 spection : — 
 
 " If the king in his punishments violates the laws and statutes of 
 the land, the people perish ; his fate changes, and another takes his 
 place. In place of unjust kings and judges, the Judge of heaven and 
 earth shall appoint just ones. If the judges take bribes, or officers 
 
 1 Records of the Past (Inscription of Sennacli.), i. 31, 32. 
 
 2 Menant ; Les Annales des Rois d'Assyrie., p. 93. 
 
 3 Records of the Past, iii. 122-23- * Il'i'^' '^- '5. '7. 18. 22. 
 6 Ibid., ix. 15 ; vii. 49, 54- ® I^'^^-' ^"- ■^^- 
 
206 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 extort tribute, the land shall go to its enemies. Whether Ruler or 
 Priest or General (he be), whoever is guardian of the Temple, shall 
 revere the shrines of the great gods." ^ 
 
 It adds to the interest of these remarkable affirmations 
 that they were copied by the Assyrians from an old Baby- 
 lonian text. In their substance they probably belong to 
 the early Accadian civilization,^ and illustrate the high 
 point it had reached in the science of government. This 
 last of the great Assyrian rulers confesses that none of 
 his predecessors had regarded these ancient edicts of the 
 Higher Law. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, the strength of the Semite was in 
 his religious earnestness. His passions are the voices 
 of gods. Ishtar says to Esarhaddon, " An unsparing 
 deity am I." "By. her high command" he "plants his 
 standards."^ Insurgents are rebels against the great gods, 
 who visit them with the sword of their anger."* Hear what 
 these world-masters say. " I brought the judgment of 
 Assiiur my god on evil men." ^ "I did for the gods what 
 they willed. ... I prayed them that I might conquer my 
 enemies ; they heard and came to my aid. My great bow 
 that Asshur gave me I took." " I called upon Asshur 
 for life, children, victory, and I put my faith in him.'* '^ 
 These kings are ministers of jealous gods, sent to extir- 
 pate heretics, to restore the true worship.*^ Tiglath-pileser 
 enumerates the whole Assyrian Olympus, and ascribes all 
 the glory of his conquests to each and every god at the 
 beginning of his record. They glory in his victories. 
 Sin delays the sunrise to destroy the foes of Asshur- 
 bani-pal.^ In return, the conquerors feast their divine 
 masters in palaces, filled with trophies and dedicated to 
 
 1 Records of the Past, vii. 1 19-122. ^ Ibid., iii. 104. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 105. * Ibid., iii. i23(Inscrip. of Esarhad.) 
 
 * Ibid., i 50 (Inscrip. of Sennach.). 
 
 6 Ibid., vii. 55 and 11, 12 (Inscrip. of Sargon) ; vii. 77 (Inscrip. of Sennach.). 
 
 ' Ibid-, iii. 41. * Ibid-, ix. 50. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 20/ 
 
 their service through all generations to come.^ The re- 
 semblance of this Assyrio-Babylonian piety to the Hebrew 
 is obvious. Nebuchadnezzar sings of Merodach as the 
 Psalmist of his Jahveh : — 
 
 " When the Lord Merodach made me. he placed my germ in my 
 mother's womb, and being conceived, I was brought forth. I, thy 
 worshipper, am the woric of thy hand ; and tlie empire over multitudes 
 hast thou assigned me, according to thy favor, accorded unto all. 
 May thy majesty be exalted! may it endure in thy worship ! In my 
 heart may it continue, and the life which is devoted unto thee ! " ' 
 
 " O God Merodach, says Neriglissar [sixth century before Christ], 
 Light of the Gods, Father, even for thy high unchanging glory a house 
 have 1 builded ! May its fulness increase ! may it acquire treasures ! 
 may its tributes multiply from the kings of all nations from the East 
 to the West ! May they come up into it forever ! "* 
 
 Nabonidus prays that the fear of his god (the Moon) 
 may prolong his life ; and for his son, that " the great 
 lord may fix his awe in his heart that he may never fall 
 into iniquity, and that his glory may endure." ^ 
 
 On the " black obelisk " of Shalmaneser, Bel is "Father 
 of the gods and the Creator ; " Ishtar, " the Perfecter of 
 Heroism; " Nebo, the "Father on high."^ 
 
 Schrader has translated several fragments which show 
 the depth of this Assyrian piety, in the sense of divine 
 help and of retributory law: — 
 
 " He who fears not his God, shall like a reed be broken. 
 He who honors not Istar, his strength shall wither. 
 He fades as the light of a star is withdrawn ; 
 Like waters of the night he vanishes."' 
 
 " Who will teach me thy high command ? 
 Who will do the like with thee ? 
 Among the gods thy brothers, thou hast no equal." 
 
 • Records of the Past, iii. 123, 124. - Ibid., v. 113-115. 
 
 » Ibid.,v. 142. * Ibid., v. 14S. 
 
 s Ibid., 1). 29. 
 
208 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 " Ilu, my maker, take hold of my arms ! 
 Guide the breath of my mouth, guide my hands, 
 O Lord of Light ! " 
 
 " O Sun, at thy command, his sins are atoned for. 
 His transgressions are aboHshed.'' ' 
 
 A prayer for the soul of a dying person is translated by 
 Talbot, — 
 
 " Like a bird may it fly to a lofty place ! 
 To the holy hands of its God may it ascend ! " 
 
 and another: — 
 
 " The man who is departing in glory, may his soul shine radiant as 
 
 brass I "' 
 " Bind the sick man to heaven, for from earth he is being torn away. 
 
 Of the brave man who was so strong, his strength is departed. 
 
 May tlie Sun, greatest of gods, receive his soul into his holy hands." '^ 
 
 Asshur-bani-pal prays to Ishtar to aid him against an 
 invading king of Elam, addressing her as queen of queens 
 and queen of gods, and imploring her presence on the 
 field of battle to turn the tide in his favor. She replies, 
 "Fear not; according to thy prayer, thy eyes shall see 
 judgment." And " in the vision of a seer she speaks to 
 him as a mother to a child." ^ 
 
 The king prayed directly to his gods, without intermedi- 
 ation of priest, and consecrated his kingdom to their ser- 
 vice ; yet had faith in the dreams of seers, at least when 
 they predicted him victory over his foes.^ Asshur-bani-pal 
 pays special court to Ishtar, queen of the gods, terrible in 
 battle, who appears to his seer after his own invocation 
 of her, with halo and bow, and like a mother in travail 
 to bring him forth.^ 
 
 1 Schrader: H'dllenfakri der Isiar, pp. SS, 96, 97, 105 
 5 Records of the Past, iii. 134, 135. 
 
 '• Ibid., vii. 67, 6S. ■* Ibid. (Asshur-bani-pal), i. 77; ix. 52, 591 
 
 ^ Ibid., ix. 52. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 209 
 
 This religion survives death. The spiritual part of 
 man {iitukkri) dwells in a dreary underworld, yet is 
 sometimes said to be raised to the heaven of the gods, 
 as are the heroes of the epic of Izdubar. Certain pas- 
 sages in a hymn concerning feasts, blessings, and rest 
 from care, supposed by Lenormant and others to refer 
 to a future life, are believed by Schrader to describe the 
 future prosperity of Assyria.^ But there is no question 
 that the conception of death carried with it the meaning 
 of utter helplessness and gloom. It is that which we find 
 in the Phoenician tombs and the Hebrew scriptures, — the 
 underworld, or Sheol. The grave leads to darkness, to the 
 house men enter, but cannot depart from ; the road men 
 go, but cannot return ; abode of famine, where earth is 
 their food, where ghosts flutter like birds, and dust lies 
 undisturbed on the threshold.^ There an angry goddess 
 punishes the intruder from the realms of day, even though 
 a queen of heaven. Even in these abysses there is a 
 fountain of life, of which Ishtar drinks and is released. 
 Por she is the goddess of love, who has descended there 
 because " the son of life " has died, and for Nature's 
 sake must be recovered that all things perish not. But 
 whether all inconspicuous persons passed at death into 
 this doleful Hades, and whether, as the epic would imply, 
 heaven was the reward only of the great, of rulers, divines, 
 or conquerors, is matter of doubt. Heaven is divided into 
 spheres, which testifies to personal interest in the here- 
 after. The ghost can be brought back to earth, to speak 
 and teach.^ There are passages in which the idea of death 
 brings even poetic sentiment. It enfolds Heabani " like a 
 garment." When the " righteous man " dies, " may he 
 rise on high, with garments silver white, ascending to the 
 
 ' Records of the Past, vii. 133, 134. Lenormant: La Divination, p. 153. 
 2 Descent of Ishtar. Records of the Past, i. 145. Lenormant : Origines d. Hist., pp. 
 «74, 175- 
 
 * Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, p. 167. 
 
 14 
 
2IO DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Sun, greatest of gods ! "^ But so far as now appears, there 
 is no distinction of good and evil, no law of retribution 
 taking effect on all men after death ; ^ and there is no hint 
 that the common fate of a gloomy sheol was in any sense 
 a doom, or even a consequence of sin. Like the lament 
 of Job, that he must depart " to the land of darkness and 
 death-shade, where no order is, and the light itself is 
 night," ^ these Accadian images probably paint the in- 
 stinctive shrinking of man from the sense of his mortality. 
 The vivid picture of the descent of Ishtar through the 
 seven gates, of temple, images, and altars, and a judge on 
 his golden throne,"* of her gradual disrobing and reinvest- 
 ment, is doubtless, as has already been said, explicable 
 rather from astronomy than from popular belief 
 
 The extreme interest of the Mongolian race in the tomb 
 as a centre of religious rites and family tributes, causes us 
 to feel no surprise at the immense number of these re- 
 ceptacles on the soil of Chaldea, reminding the traveller 
 of ancient Etruria or modern China. Here are collected 
 all things believed desirable for the departed, — vessels 
 of bronze and clay, images, cylinders (for writing), and 
 articles of food. It is one of those inconsistencies which 
 mark all crude belief about the dead, that these solid 
 substances should have been supposed available for such 
 mere shadowy ghosts as they were imagined to be. These 
 objects correspond to the papyrus and cylinders on which 
 the people of Egypt wrote their private sympathies and 
 histories, but more obscurely. But while there is so much 
 in Chaldea to testify to popular belief in the reality of a 
 future life, nothing as yet has come from Assyria to tell 
 us what was to befall the souls of the generations as they 
 passed away. Their place of the dead was as dim and 
 
 * Records of tlie Past, iii. 135. 
 
 ^ Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, p. 166. Smith {^Assyrian Discoveries, 221) says that 
 Sheol was destined for the wicked ; but on what authority ? 
 
 ^ Job X. 20-22. * Records 0/ tlie Past, L IS'- 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 211 
 
 shadowy as the Hebrew Sheol. Was the glory of the 
 nation and the immortality of the royal will so absorbing 
 that, as with the Hebrew, no ethical sanction or spiritual 
 motive was sought in the future life, and the mind of the 
 people did not rest in its associations? That instinct, or 
 intuition of continuity, on which the belief in immortality 
 is based, with the Semitic nations secured expression in a 
 profound interest in visible destinies on earth. And this 
 is as abundantly shown in the abounding life on the As- 
 syrian monuments, as the interest of the Chaldean in the 
 future life is evidenced in his passion for tombs. The 
 one class represents the Mongolian, the other the Semitic, 
 mind. 
 
 The royal monuments, Assyrian or Accadian, are not 
 a mere dull record of wars and buildings ; this flame of 
 conquest rises into poetic feeling, and into the frenzy of 
 barbarian passions, which remind us of the wars of the 
 Hebrews in the days of the Judges and the Kings. These 
 royal conquerors " scale the mountain peaks, the misty 
 heights where no bird can pass ; " they " rush like eagles, 
 in one day, upon the strongholds of their foes." ^ They 
 love rough, dangerous places, leap the cliffs like wild 
 goats, and drink the coldest spring-water from the rock.^ 
 They " scatter corpses like chaff; thrash the land like an 
 ox." ^ Their " faultless horses step, yoked to their chari- 
 ots, through pools of blood, and the wheels are clogged 
 with the slain," while " the heads of soldiers are stuffed 
 in baskets," like scalps on the raids of savages."* They 
 " thunder like the god of the air ; " they " cast down rings 
 and bracelets like the fall of rain ; " ° and the hearts of 
 kings grow " feeble as children ; they trample their own 
 soldiers under foot, and flee like scared birds." ^ 
 
 ^ Records of tJie Past, i. 15. 2 Ibid., i. 42, 43. 
 
 3 Ibid., lii. 88, 94. •" Ibid., i. 51, 52. 
 
 5 Ibid., i. 51. • Ibid., i. 53. 
 
212 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Asshur-bani-pal celebrated " the harvest-feast when the 
 gods seated him on the throne of his fathers, when Vul 
 poured down his rain, Hea feasted his people, the seed 
 bore fivefold, the cattle multiplied, and famine was at an 
 end." ^ 
 
 In the myth of the seven storm spirits, who, compounded 
 of beasts and tempests, and moving in meteors, plot se- 
 cretly against the Sun and Moon, the vexed gods, after 
 watching them vigilantly, resist their assaults, when, rush- 
 ing like the hurricane, they fall like firebrands on the 
 earth/'^ This prototype of the Greek war of gods and 
 Titans shows how the passionate genius of these world- 
 stormers invested eclipses and lightnings with its own 
 human ideals of battle for dominion over the world. 
 
 So in the Accadian poem of the Descent of Ishtar, god- 
 dess of love and daughter of the Moon,"^ the sympathy of 
 Nature with an ideal human purpose is signified by the 
 refusal of the earth to bear fruit, or the beasts to bring 
 forth young, or the gods to find comfort who preside over 
 the change of seasons, till through their interference the 
 wandering soul (or son) of life and growth is released 
 from the bolts and bonds of the death-world. It is not 
 wrath that dooms her to such descent, but her grief for 
 life cut ofi" in its prime, which stirs her to the sacrifice ; 
 and which we can only interpret by the resurrection of all 
 things in Nature at her return, proving that the universe 
 was secure, and that life and light were the lords of dark- 
 ness and death. Her seven royal forms of beauty, stripped 
 from her body one by one by the inexorable law of the 
 underworld, are one by one restored ; and the death of 
 the Oriental Adonis, or youth of Nature, is changed by 
 love stronger than death or hell into resurrection. 
 
 1 Records of the Past, i. 6j. 
 
 2 Ibid., V. 164-166. 
 
 * Schrader in the Allgemeine Zeiiung (Augsburg), June 19, 1874. 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 213 
 
 Our review of Chaldeo-Assyrian civilization has shown 
 its remarkable contrast in respect of mental type with 
 those of the Hindus and the Chinese. It is not cerebral 
 like the one, nor vmscular like the other; but is repre- 
 sented by the nen'oiis force, in that ethnic symbolism in 
 which we have found the best expression of Oriental qual- 
 ities. In other words, it recognizes both ideas and things, 
 both inward and outward relations; subject and object; 
 bringing the two sides together in mutual dependence, as 
 efficient cause and instant result. Hindu tJwiigJit clings 
 to abstractions ; Chinese work plunges through concrete 
 details, and is held there. Iranian nerve, which we here 
 begin to apprehend, mediates between the two forms of 
 activity, the two worlds of thought and things, by a flash 
 of living sympathy, by open and direct rapport. This is 
 the condition of human progress. The Iranian mind, in 
 its general sense, is thus the connecting bond, or transi- 
 tion, between the Oriental and Occidental worlds ; and is 
 traceable as such through all the phases of civilization, 
 for the last two thousand years. 
 
 Note the substance of these cuneiform records of Chal- 
 deo-Assyrian history. It is not contemplative ; nothing 
 like meditation or philosophic construction, scarcely any 
 form of continuous intellectual development, appears in 
 it. Nor is it realistic and positive, in the sense of dwell- 
 ing on details or elaborating uses of things ; of working 
 for the pure love of work. It does not lose sight of the 
 principle of causation, and that personal energy which is 
 the ideal of causation, for mere interest in sequences and 
 trains of palpable phenomena. 
 
 It is at once ideal and actual ; the nerve which is neither 
 mind alone, nor matter alone, but the passage of one into 
 the other ; the energy of impulse, — unconscious of self, 
 unconscious of the results of action ; conscious only of pur- 
 pose, of rushing powers, of the inspiration of creative act, 
 
214 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 of the victory of an all-absorbing aim. So earnest is this 
 directness of impulse, that it constitutes the base of a reli- 
 gion, — a religion of marvellous historic power, which has 
 been essentially the main factor of European faith hitherto. 
 For what is the natural religious form of such a mental 
 type? Not the worship of principles, not the worship of 
 possessions ; but the worship of personal Will. Its ideal 
 is the conquering king, the royal god ; the reduction of 
 the whole world to the footstool of One, whose represen- 
 tative is the inspired chief or leader, the Master to whom 
 every knee shall bend. What we shall find of most his- 
 toric value in the study of these religious faiths which 
 have been adopted by the We^ from the wonderful Se- 
 mitic race, through the modifying influence of the Aryan 
 to which properly the West belongs, is their common cen- 
 tre in the worship of personalities of one form or another. 
 And of this religious development the earlier stages are 
 palpable in the Chaldeo-Assyrian absorption in will-power. 
 It is concrete will that first incarnates the worship of the 
 Person. Then it passes on into forms of religious absolu- 
 tism, — into monarchical exclusive gods of infinite power, 
 and saviours whose undivided authority is veiled in spirit- 
 ual conceptions and humanities, but whose churches domi- 
 nate ages and races with barbarous tyrannies in the name 
 of God, as absolute owner of mankind. 
 
 The principle is ever one and the same. It is in a Per- 
 son that the religious sentiment is centred here, — just as 
 in India it was in an idea; just as in China it was in an 
 organization, secular and political. This also is a single 
 phase of evolution ; and future ages must see the personal 
 element lose its exclusive sway over the mind of man, 
 just as the merely abstract and the merely concrete have 
 been already passed, and become merged in a completer 
 form of the Ideal. For as mind aspired beyond its mere 
 brain, or its mere muscle, so beyond its mere nerve which 
 
CUNEIFORM MONUMENTS. 21$ 
 
 binds them it evolves the harmonious form of integral 
 man. 
 
 Our Assyrio-Chaldean study opens that intermediate 
 Iranian phase of world-development which has now been 
 stated. The question may well be asked, Why should it 
 begin in Iran? The answer is, That although Iran is a 
 geographical rather than an ethnic designation, yet the 
 word, as I think, may fairly stand for a function as well, 
 to which undoubtedly its geographical relations have 
 largely contributed. This function, the reality of which 
 must be shown in our proposed study of the races which 
 have arisen within its limits, may here be very briefly 
 stated, upon the strength of what the reader of these 
 volumes may be supposed to know. 
 
 It was inevitable that when the isolation of races began 
 to diminish on the open plateau of Iran, and centres of 
 civilization were formed at the mouths of its great rivers, 
 like the Mesopotamian, the friction of elements, the op- 
 portunities of commerce, the conflict of interests and 
 faiths should awaken the sense of personal power and 
 the aspiration to recognize and attain it. The wills of 
 men became their master faculty. On the Turanian basis 
 of material civilization arose the Semitic passion and ex- 
 clusiveness ; and in both, as later in the other races which 
 swept in tides over the high plains and down the river 
 bottoms, the desire of world-sway became far more in- 
 tense than was possible either in China or Hindustan. In 
 the conflict of strong passions thus stimulated, the power 
 of will inevitably becomes the religious and moral ideal. 
 f The Chaldeo-Assyrian civilization is mainly characterized 
 by the demand for some realization of this ideal, by masses 
 who could not achieve it freely for themselves. It thus 
 represents a very early phase in the growth of the religion 
 of personal government. Not the seiise of will-force, but 
 the demand for it, was what produced those terrible kings 
 
2l6 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 and their absolute sway. These great accumulations of 
 human elements have no inward sense of unity, nor re- 
 spect for law, except so far as it is embodied in the royal 
 person and will. If the king dies, all are in revolt; the 
 unorganized atoms are continually breaking away even 
 in his lifetime. Always the sin charged on subject kings 
 as casiis-belli is that they have dared to refuse tribute, to 
 deny allegiance. Here was forming, against all natural re- 
 luctance, by superior force of constructive will-power, the 
 tremendous idea of the divine right of kings. And this 
 was the foretype and crude primary condition of the cor- 
 responding force which created modern religions ; nor can 
 their relations to universal religion be understood without 
 going back to the special line of human tendency of which 
 they are the fulfilment. So we shall devote a chapter to 
 the earliest form in which this power was exercised, — the 
 influence of Babylon on Hebrew religion. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 
 
 T) ABYLON has been called the " key of universal his- 
 -*-^ tory." A claim so exclusive can of course have only 
 a limited truth. The science of historical construction in 
 our age finds a significance which cannot be measured in 
 every human aspiration, and traces every individual cur- 
 rent into the majestic tide of progress, to which it contri- 
 butes some needed impulse. Nor can any moral instinct 
 or principle of conduct be tracked to its human beginning 
 in any one age, or locality, or person. Not only is it im- 
 possible to explore the origin of fetichism, polytheism, 
 monotheism, pantheism, or the belief in incarnation or 
 development, but not one of them can be explained or 
 interpreted by any special set of influences, personal or 
 institutional. Every effect was somehow contained in its 
 cause ; and to neglect the foregleams, the prophetic in- 
 timations, the unconscious or self-conscious tendencies 
 which prove natural attractions to be slowly shaping the 
 mind of man, is to forget that the whole human cosmos 
 is implicated in every stage and step of human growth. 
 
 Yet it is true that there are crucial epochs, places, move- 
 ments in history; nucleating points, nerve-ganglia as it 
 were, where the collision and concentration of tendencies 
 bring forth vast results for all time, and radiate light 
 alike on past and future progress. Wonder and gratitude 
 have successively transformed these centres into exclusive 
 divine inlets, from whose supernatural gifts the whole world 
 has its meaning and value. The progress of universal 
 religion consists in finding that these in their turn are 
 
220 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 explicable through other similar centres ; that truth does 
 not enter man by jets from without, but is slowly evolved 
 through ages of growth ; and that the only inspiration 
 possible to man is his natural relation to the Infinite, as 
 the substance of his own being, the never-ending progress 
 of his ideal life. Natural sequence takes the place of 
 supernatural interference and external will. A " chosen 
 people " becomes simply a race endowed by the laws of 
 genius and of inheritance, from its ancestral relations to 
 other races, with special powers of moulding human history 
 in a certain way. Bibles are found to be borrowers from 
 older experiences, literatures rooted in unsuspected secu- 
 lar soils. The prophets arc taught from the heart of hu- 
 manity, and the " saviours " transmit the ancient torch of 
 love. Under these laws of historic wholeness, the functions 
 of races and of persons are special functions. And we 
 now add the peculiar civilization of which Babylon was 
 the type to those of India and China, as presented in 
 previous volumes of this work, as another illustration of 
 this truth. 
 
 The centre of Chaldeo-Assyrian consciousness was the 
 king ; and in this fact lies the secret of that special func- 
 tion which makes it possible to speak of Babylonian civili- 
 zation as a " key of history." The Hindu throne was 
 subject to religion as an absolute idea, incarnated in the 
 absolutism of a priesthood. The Chinese throne was 
 subject to organic civil and political law. The Chaldeo- 
 Assyrian (first form of Iranian government) owns no 
 allegiance but to personal will, which of itself represents 
 Asshur or Bel, — "/reward and punish; /chastise here- 
 tics; / torture and ravage and tear down and massacre 
 for my authority's sake. / bring the spoils into my 
 palaces, and there I feast my gods; there I record my 
 glories ; there I repose and dwell for ever in my works ; 
 and whoso comes after me shall respect these and keep 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 221 
 
 them inviolate, or come under my curse." Tiiis, it will 
 be seen, is but another Lord in the same line with Jahveh, 
 Allah, and the Christian God of Judgment. It is the dei- 
 fied personal Will ; the conscious Ego set in the roots of 
 the universe, the monarchical element in religion. Nor is 
 there in the whole series any essential difference of qual- 
 ity: the barbarous features which attend the conquering 
 Ego of Nineveh being natural elements of exclusive will, 
 and only partially transferred in the progress of civiliza- 
 tion from material to spiritual spheres of sway. These 
 devastating kings who condescend to no other notice of 
 the rivals they overthrow than to record the lightning 
 marches by which their cities were razed and burned, 
 their treasures carried off, their people, men and women, 
 enslaved, their fastnesses scaled, their goods heaped like 
 corn to be destroyed, the horrible barbarities, which it is 
 needless to repeat, inflicted on those that held out against 
 the invader, eclipsing the occasional mercy shown those 
 that submitted on his approach, — are paralleled in the 
 history of English Puritanism, in the treatment of Ireland 
 by the Church of England in the days of Elizabeth,^ and 
 in the whole history of witchcraft in modern Europe. 
 They, too, are inspired by religious earnestness ; they em- 
 body the exclusive rights of the omnipotent Will they 
 worship ; they come home to kneel before the Lady Ishtar, 
 to pour out their tributes of spoils before the sun-god, and 
 spare men's lives that they may learn the worship of their 
 own established shrines.^ Sayce maintains that they are 
 shown by the monuments to have offered human sacrifices 
 to Bel, and even to have given the name " the sacrifice 
 of Bel " to the first month and zodiacal sign.^ He also 
 interprets expressions in the hymns as implying vicarious 
 
 * Lecky : England m the Fourteenth Century, vol. ii. 
 
 - Records of the Past, v. 17. 
 
 ' Biblical Archeology, vol. iv. pt. i. pp. 25, 31. 
 
222 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 sacrifice, though it may be early to accept this as histori- 
 cally certain. But is not the dogma of the Christian 
 Church founded upon forms of both these atonements; 
 and has not every religious war which that Church has 
 waged aeainst heretics been for the maintenance of these 
 beliefs, and prosecuted with barbarities justified by the 
 will of the Deity, as were the corresponding vicarious 
 atonements to Jahveh or to Bel? 
 
 The Assyrian conquerors represent the ardent youth of 
 this impulse to enthrone omnipotent will. 
 
 As yet there is no scientific sense of truth, no organized 
 law of equity, no balance of powers controlling personal 
 desire, to check it. And out of this consciousness of indi- 
 vidual will, and its earliest religious form as allegiance to 
 exclusive personalities, grew all the great Semitic faiths, 
 mastering similar tendencies in the less intense Aryan, so 
 as to have established themselves as recognized lords of 
 revelation, creators of the religions of civilization ; until 
 the Aryan reaction in modern times has come to supplant 
 the worship of all gods in the image — divine or human — 
 of personal will, by immutable laws of the universe, and 
 by developed intuitions of humanity. 
 
 And with these come the saving checks to this deeply- 
 rooted anthropomorphic ideal, which assure the liberty 
 of every individual to think, to doubt, to aspire, and to 
 bring his personal will into obedient conformity with 
 natural laws. 
 
 How far the Chaldeo-Assyrian, or rather Babylonian, 
 world gives the key to universal history can only appear 
 after tracing those later phases of its influence which open 
 with the conquests of Cyrus, to the Jewish captivit)^, and 
 ripen in the union of Eastern and Western civilizations 
 through the conquests of Alexander of Macedon. But 
 the period of the cuneiform records, already reviewed, 
 
THE IIEP.TIEW AND THE CPIALDEAN, 223 
 
 indicates it as the source of much that has long passed 
 for isolated and special revelation to the Hebrew, or 
 original invention by other races, Semitic or Aryan. 
 
 The ancestral land of Semitism, Northern as well as 
 Southern, was probably Arabia. Canaan and Phoenicia 
 were its sister provinces of great antiquity, but Babylon 
 was its earliest school. Its gods, legends, and traditions, 
 especially those of the Northern family, point in this 
 direction, at least for their clearest expression. Its plan- 
 etary worship, its sun-gods and moon-gods, and their close 
 association with the sexual instincts, shown in androgy- 
 nous deities, in goddesses riding on lions or oxen, and in 
 the virile productivity of the bull; its terrible passion-gods 
 of fire, the bloody rites of Moab and Ammon, the sacrifice 
 of children to the Baals and Molochs, of virginity to the 
 Astartes (Ishtars) and Beltises; its self-consuming frenzy 
 of undisciplined desires, vibrating between sensual impulse 
 and ascetic self-mutilation, — found typical developments 
 in an Assyrio-Chaldean form as tendencies more or less 
 universal in the whole family, but imperfectly organized 
 in the West, and by tribes less influenced than the Eastern 
 Semites by Turanian industry and culture. They are, 
 however, associated v/ith the seven Cabiri, everywhere the 
 expressions of agriculture and other toil, with renovation 
 through the fires of energy. They were all expressions of 
 that absolutism of will, that worship of all-mastering per- 
 sonal purpose, whose god in Assyria was military omnipo- 
 tence, whose passion for self-gratification an all-consuming 
 flame. Yet another and still older form of the same ideal 
 was the thirst to seize new worlds of physical resources 
 beyond the sea, embodied in the fish-gods of the Chaldean 
 and Phoenician coasts, the adoration of oceanic productiv- 
 ity, and in the commercial ambition of Babylon and Tyre. 
 These gods of Nature's productivity, instinct with life, with 
 all vital relations and powers, had in all those cults similar 
 
224 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 names and toils. The wanderings of Baal-MeIkarth,Tyrian 
 god of cities, were the prototype of the Greek Herakles, 
 and closely associated with the mythic history of this 
 grand embodiment of heroic will, who carries us back 
 also not only to the sun-gods of Asia Minor, ^ but beyond 
 these to Assyrian customs and beliefs.^ In all the Greek 
 heroic wanderings and labors, east and west, there is 
 everywhere a strong Semitic element in the ardor which 
 thus followed the victorious march of the Sun through 
 the heavens, picturing his hourly struggles with monsters 
 harmful to man, till he reaches his martyrdom of fire in 
 the glowing west, burning himself in his own flames, to 
 rise again on the morrow. The whole conception of the 
 myth is Semitic. It is characterized, like those of the 
 Lydian Sandon, the Assyrian Sardanapalus, the Hebrew 
 Samson, and the Phoenician Dido, by the thoroughly Se- 
 mitic idea of a tragic death of the god or hero through 
 his association with the other sex. The service of Om- 
 phale in feminine dress and the fatal tunic of Dejanira, 
 which bring the doom of Herakles, the fall of Epimetheus 
 through the box of Pandora, are foreshadowed by earlier 
 Assyrian, Phoenician, and other myths of divine men who 
 fell under the dominion of women, or assumed their garb 
 and habits, to their own ruin.^ In the Assyrian festival of 
 the Sakae, a slave was made to play the king, allowed the 
 freedom of the harem, dressed in women's garments, and 
 finally put to death. The myth of Dionysus, as well as 
 that of Herakles, goes back to Chaldeo-Assyrian Semitism, 
 where Dian-nisi is the Sun in his whole life, death, and 
 resurrection, interpreted by the extremes of human pas- 
 
 * Especially the Lydian Sandon. 
 
 ' Movers: Die Ph'dnizier, i. 458. O'^'p^xW^Etudes Assyriennes, p. iSi. Maury: His- 
 toire des Religions de la. Grice, iii. 152, 240. Hartung : Die Religion und BIythologie 
 der Griechen, iv. 202, 203. Schwenck : Myihologie der Semiten, pp. 277-318. Duncker; 
 Gesch Alterth, i. 154. 
 
 3 Hartung: Die Religion tind RIythologie der Griechen, iv. 202-204. As Niniis and 
 Semiramis, Sardanapalus and his' harem. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 225 
 
 sion, by orgies of grief and joy. The women whom 
 EzekieP describes as weeping for Tammuz at Jerusalem 
 were, — in part at least, — drawn from his Babylonian 
 experience. Tam-zi, " the sun of life," or " morning 
 sun," beloved by Ishtar (Ashtoreth), queen of heaven, is 
 Dian-nisi in his radiant youth. He passes into night of 
 the day or of the year, and the earth pines and fails for 
 grief. Ishtar, who is reproached as the wanton cause of 
 his death, 2 descends to the underworld, probably to seek 
 him, though this reason is not given, and finds there 
 the water of immortality. This idea of immortality is 
 forever associated with these lessons of the dying year.^ 
 But this worship of Tammuz (the Syrian Adonis) in fact 
 goes back in Canaan or Syria, as well as in all western Asia, 
 to the old Byblos cult, primitive beyond all discovery, — 
 type of summer bloom, as parched and torn to death by 
 the wild boar of drought, as of so many like forms, repre- 
 senting the religious agonies and ecstasies of ancient wor- 
 ship. Adonis had been consigned by Aphrodite, his divine 
 mistress, who corresponds to Ishtar, to the care of Perse- 
 phone in the underworld, part of which fate was remitted by 
 Zeus, but nothing could forefend the cruel death to come. 
 So Demeter, Earth-mother of the Greeks, treats her beau- 
 tiful Kore (the spring-time) in like manner, and then de- 
 scends to hades in search of her, while the world mourns. 
 This widespread myth of the dying god for whom Nature 
 pines, and the Maenad howls and tears her hair, and Love 
 descends to death to win him back is, in this special form 
 at least, of Semitic origin, a gift of Assyrio-Chaldean Dian- 
 nisi, — prototype, or rather germ-notion, of redemption 
 through death and resurrection of the just man, as a basis 
 of theological creeds. Equally Semitic is the tendency of 
 
 1 Ezek- viii. 14. 
 
 2 See Assyrian Texts {Records of the Past, i. 141). 
 * Sayce (Biblical Archaology. iii. p. i6S). 
 
 IS 
 
226 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 this tragic fatality to take the form of suicide, — the natural 
 reaction and irony of uncontrollable will. The illustration 
 is to be seen in most of the myths already specified, where 
 that inevitable fall comes through some fatal mastery in 
 what is one's own, which outward forces alone could not 
 effect. Just as the frenzy of passion is represented as 
 driving to self-mutilation the rage of Maenads in their 
 Bacchic rites, ^ so these gods and heroes of Semitic my- 
 thology, whether Assyrian, Hebrew, Phoenician, or Greek, 
 build their own funeral pyres, or pull down temples on 
 their own heads, or burn themselves under their own 
 treasures, or cut off their own heads, like their prototype 
 Bel-Merodach of Babylon. Even the best must be sacri- 
 ficed, because life was the gift and power of God himself 
 and man's highest possession, and the greatest must give 
 the life of his dearest ones and his own. These are the ter- 
 rible fires of Semitic faith, the first fountains of its bloody 
 atonements, and its sacrifices of the "first-born" and the 
 "only-begotten" to omnipotent will; frenzied dualism of 
 the productive and destructive passions, which resulted 
 in the Dualism of its more refined and spiritual religions. 
 The sun is its symbol, — the sun, not as centre and source 
 and static lawgiver of the universe, but as active, instant 
 mastery; as tremendous energy of determination, intensity 
 of desire, and exclusiveness of claim. This is Assyria, this 
 is Semitized Babylon. 
 
 The Phoenician cosmogony is also a grand play of im- 
 agination with successive personalities, male and female. 
 In the Babylonian and Phoenician cosmogonies alike,^ the 
 shaping power of the cosmos is desire acting on a pre- 
 existing subject mass ; in the Hebrew, the idea of purpose 
 in the brooding " Breath " {riiacJi) is equally personal. 
 Their chaos, preceding creation, is itself alive with pro- 
 
 ' These are originally Semitic. 
 * Berosus and Sanchonialhoa. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 22/ 
 
 digious half-shaped forms strugghng for power, and the 
 constructive creator must put them under by superior will. 
 Not like the Hindu world-maker, by pure thought, nor like 
 the Chinese, by pure work, does the Semite bring things 
 to being ; but by commandment of will, by the very passion 
 oi life, — the giving forth of it in its wholeness, whether by 
 word of Elohim or by suicide of Bel. So did he put his 
 soul into the senses, his impulses into unbridled master- 
 ships, his ideals into the all-consuming cosmic fires. And 
 the impetus of this towering and aggressive will, self- 
 abandoned to deified passions, has made him a controlling 
 factor in the religious history of the last two thousand 
 years. And of this historic power Babylon is the opening 
 key. Let us note how far Hebrew religion was traceable 
 to Chaldeo-Assyrian influences. 
 
 Ur, the traditional home of the Abrahamite family, now 
 identified with Mugheir, was an important city of the Chal- 
 dees (possibly Siirippak, the centre of Accadian literature), 
 and is represented on the tablets as the most Turanian of the 
 twenty cities of the Euphrates valley.^ And still further back, 
 the ancestors of Abraham are connected with Arphaxad, 
 the "neighborhood of the Chaldeans."'^ This filiation of 
 the Hebrews with the Chaldeans is confirmed by the close 
 relation of their earliest customs with those recorded in 
 Accadian inscriptions, — such as divination by clouds,^ by 
 trees, as exemplified in the burning bush ; * by dreams of 
 seers, by evocation of the dead, the very name of familiar 
 spirits {pbotJi) being Accadian ; ^ by the serpent, a Turanian 
 type of wisdom and power. The worship of the heavenly 
 host on Hebrew high places allies itself to the ziggurats 
 (high towers) of the Chaldean cities ; the planetary number 
 
 ' Saj'ce's Smith: Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 318. Lenormant : Chaldean Magic, 
 
 P- 339- 
 
 ^ Genesis, x. 
 
 3 Leviticus, xix. 26; Deuteronomy, xviii. 10; 2 Kings, xxi. 6 ; Isaiah, ii. 6; Micah,v. 11. 
 
 * Lenormant : Divination, etc., p. 86. ^ Ibid., p. 162. 
 
228 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 seven, made sacred by the Hebrews in their creative week 
 before they conceived of connecting it with Jahveh's rest,^ 
 is Assyrian. The prophylactic images of gods {tcrdphivi), 
 of which the Urim and Thummin were probably forms, 
 had their prototypes in Accadian magic.^ So witchcraft 
 and sorcery; and so demonic possession, exorcisms, the 
 Sabbath, and the cherubim, which are simply the winged 
 human-headed bull of the Chaldean sculptures.^ 
 
 Previous to these Assyrian relations, however, must be 
 recognized the Canaanite origin of much in Hebrew tradi- 
 tion and life. The name El, for example, as a general 
 appellation of God, was a part of their Canaanite heritage. 
 Phoenician mythology, as we have it in the fragments of 
 Sanchoniathon, has so many points of closest resemblance 
 to the Genesis-legend that the common origin of these 
 traits in Canaanite tribal association is unmistakable. 
 These fragments seem to concern only the older and na- 
 tive Phoenician traditions, — that is the Canaanite. We note 
 not only the striking similarity in the story of creation, but 
 the common stories of giant-races and their wars, the en- 
 mity of brothers, and other analogies, among which not the 
 least striking is the common name of the " Most High 
 God" {El-elyoji)} "Jehovah," says Robertson Smith, 
 "was never a Canaanite God, and the roots of the popular 
 religion were in the acknowledgment of Jehovah as Israel's 
 God, and of the duty of national service to Him, which is 
 equally the basis of Mosaic orthodoxy." But here it seems 
 to me is a confusion between the original germ and the pow- 
 erful development it received from the national spirit.^ 
 
 There can hardly be a doubt that Jahveh was originally 
 one of those sun-gods in whom all Semitic worship was 
 
 ' Kuenen : Religion of Israel, i. pp. 236-264. 
 
 ^ Lenormant : Chaldean lilagtc, p. 45. 
 
 * Lenormant : Fragm. Cosmog. , p. 78. 
 
 * Cory: Ancient Fragjn. (Hodges), pp. 1-22. 
 
 s Lectures on the Old Testament, pp. 231, 423, note. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 229 
 
 wont to centre. Leader of the stars, Jahveh of hosts, 
 institutor of the sacred planetary number in rites and tra- 
 ditions, a " consuming fire," a flame that none could look 
 upon and live, — he cannot be separated from that very- 
 numerous class of local deities of whom Melchizedek, 
 El, Baal, and Moloch were the general Canaanite repre- 
 sentatives. 
 
 These names were not distinctively personal, but meant 
 merely lord or king, — a mighty one. There was found 
 nothing incongruous in combining his worship with theirs. 
 Elohim, one of their generic names, " the mighty ones," 
 was adopted in the early national legends, and retained 
 in their later elaborations as the class-name to express 
 the personality of Jahveh ; and Jahveh-Elohim was in 
 common use.^ All these gods were worshipped alike on 
 the high-places {hdmoth)^- and a tree, symbol of Asherah, 
 was placed beside their altars. The Jahvites worshipped 
 before upright stones and columns (jnaistsehot/i) , and also 
 images of the sun {cJiammdnini)? Solomon's Jahvism built 
 tabernacles to Milcom, Chemosh, Astarte. In both king- 
 doms of Israel and Judah,* as well as through the earlier 
 periods of the Judges, this intermixture of rites was 
 common among the Jahvites ; ^ and in the days of elabo- 
 rated priestly rule it was strenuously prohibited by law.^ 
 Hosea tells us that Ephraim was given over to the Baal 
 calf-worship ; ' and especially ascribes this anti-national 
 conduct to the influence of Assyria.^ It all resulted in 
 Ezekiel's tremendous indictment of the idolatry of Jeru- 
 salem, as late as the exile ! It is to Jahveh that Jephthah 
 vows to sacrifice his daughter.^ It is at Jahveh's com- 
 mand that David hangs up the sons of Saul,^*' and Samuel 
 
 * Exodus, iii. 15. 2 j Samuel, ix. x. ; Ezekiel, xx. 28. 
 
 3 Kuenen, i. 24. * i Kings, xi. xv. 14; xvi. 14; xxiii. 43. 
 
 ^ Kuenen : Religion of hrael, i. 302, 303; 350-355; 80, 8t. 
 
 ^ Leviticus, xviii. 21. '' Hosea, viii. 6; xiii. 1,4. 
 
 * Hosea, vii. 11; xii. i. ^ Judges, xi. 30. 
 
 ^ 2 Samuel, xxi. 1-14. 
 
230 UEVELOPMENT, 
 
 hews Agag in pieces/ By Jahveh, as well as by every 
 other form of Moloch, the life of a first-born is claimed, 
 Abraham's offering of Isaac, in the myth, though pre- 
 vented by miracle, at least implies and inculcates willing- 
 ness to serve Jahveh in that way, as acceptable service ; 
 and this very spirit is blessed by Jahveh with the covenant 
 of seed.^ The dedication of men by CJierem, however, not 
 to be redeemed from death, was an offering to Jahveh as 
 punishment, not as tribute.^ 
 
 It is evident from these hints how difficult it was for 
 Jahvism to throw off its early associations with those con- 
 suming fire-gods in which Semitism embodied the absolute 
 claims of omnipotent Will. And all these traits of sun- 
 worship belong to its Assyrian descent.* Adrammclech 
 (fire-king), adored at Sepharvaim in Mesopotamia,''^ to 
 whom men " burned their sons," is a fair type of these 
 gods of Western Asia, from Chaldea to the borders of 
 Egypt. The sun and fire worship of the Aryan, as we 
 shall see, was of another order. 
 
 If, as is charged by the prophet,^ the Hebrews in the 
 desert adored Chiun (the planet Saturn), while Jahveh was 
 their guiding God ; if, as is certain, " in the patriarchal 
 age they accepted as sacred all the places the Canaanites 
 held sacred (trees, mountains, fountains, stones), and 
 the intercourse was still closer after the return from 
 Egypt," ^ — it is reasonable to believe that their worship 
 of Jahveh grew out of a similar circle of religious con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 Whether the name was introduced by Moses, ^ on the 
 Elohim's announcing for the first time that they were 
 Jahveh, — in other words, by substituting a more dis- 
 tinctly monotheistic term for deity, — or was borrowed 
 
 1 I Samuel, xv. 33. ^ Genesis, xxii. 16. 
 ^ See Kuenen, i. 291; Leviticus, xxvii. 28. 
 
 * See Rawlinson : Aiicient Motuirckies, ii. 228. ^ 2 Kings, xvii. 31. 
 
 6 Amos, V. 26. ' Renan : Langzies Semiiiques, p. no. * Exodus, vi. 3. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 23 1 
 
 from some desert tribe with whom the Hebrews came in 
 contact ; ^ whether it already existed in Assyrian mythol- 
 ogy, and is to be associated with the Phoenician Jao, or 
 is a pure creation of the prophets of the eighth century 
 before Christ, — it is certain that the Jahveh or Jahveh- 
 Elohim of the Prophets, in whose interest the whole liter- 
 ature of the Hebrew books has been worked over, is a 
 product of slow growth, and by no means entered full-born 
 into the Hebrew consciousness. 
 
 His final elevation to a far higher level than the sur- 
 rounding deities, and the renunciation of their worship as 
 idolatry, in favor of one who had created all nations and 
 made the world his footstool, was a prophetic ideal of the 
 eighth century before Christ and onwards ; but it was 
 made possible only by the partial nationalization of reli- 
 gion through earlier periods of Hebrew history. This 
 lifting of a national god into a universal Creator and 
 Ruler had its stages, — just as the old aspiration of the 
 Assyrian kings to put all other gods under the feet of 
 their own Asshur by conquest of the nations, and thor- 
 oughly to absorb the worship of all other tribes in them- 
 selves as his representatives, was a long and necessary step 
 towards monotheism, and prepared the way for receiving 
 its maturer form through the Persian worship of Ormuzd.^ 
 It is an indispensable condition to the attainment of unity 
 in the religious idea of a people, that the}" should become 
 powerfully organized as a whole, and aim at unlimited 
 power as a national ideal. As the child's first idea of 
 supreme authority is the law he finds in his parents, so in 
 races the authority of the national ruler, considered as a 
 universal claim, is the starting point of belief in one defi- 
 nite personal God above all gods, or exclusive of them. 
 Nor can there be any doubt that the positive Jahvistic 
 theism of the Hebrews was coincident in time with the 
 
 * Theile ' See Vaftia, i. i ; xix. 37; xliii. 3, 7 ; xliv. i. i. 
 
232 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 bloom of Hebrew nationality in the ages following those of 
 David and Solomon,^ — just as the struggles of the nation 
 for existence, in later times, ripened that Messianic idea 
 in which Jahveh came to his most exalted form.^ In the 
 same way, out of the sense of a separate national person- 
 ality, will, and destiny, grew up the reverence for the one 
 national God as holy. This word {kdddah) in later times, 
 the highest term for moral and spiritual purity, was con- 
 stantly applied to Jahveh, in its natural sense of separated, 
 exalted, unapproachable, isolated, in correspondence with 
 distinct national existence and purpose. The one was the 
 matrix and nurse of the other.^ When we read such 
 phrases as " the Holy One of Israel," we must remember 
 that the idea of contrast with other national gods, — that 
 is, of Egypt, Phoenicia, Edom, etc., — was always present 
 with the writer ; and that the moral allegiance implied in it 
 had its foundation and force in this sense of a community 
 of relation, origin, purpose, aim, in the nation as a whole. 
 From beginning to end, Jahveh was indeed more or less 
 God of the Hebrews ; every saint, patriarch, genealogy, 
 conquest, law, temple, prophecy, has its authority more 
 and more in the service it pays to the national destiny. 
 It is because the religious and national ideals thus reached 
 form and sustain each other, that we find such tremen- 
 dous persistency in Hebrew faith, and such absorption of 
 this race in itself as the chosen of God. This intense local 
 concentration of Will has nourished a commanding self- 
 confidence, and the world has naturally, not supernatu- 
 
 ' In the earlier legislation of the Tdrah, as seen in the Book of Exodus, a free worship 
 at local slirines, unknown to later times and mixed with Canaanite traditions and rites, made 
 such national unity impossible. But what are called the " Middle Books'' of the Law, 
 dating from the reforming kings, show the vigorous effort to counteract this want of religious 
 nationality, by which the great kings fell into Baal-worship, through legislative institutions 
 like those of Deuteronomy. But not till the exile, whose results are seen in Leviticus, was 
 religion genuinely nationalized. 
 
 ' Goldziher : Mythology aviong tlie Hebrews, p. 272. 
 
 2 Kuenen : Religion of Israel, i. 43. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 233 
 
 rally, yielded to its religious sway. It has furnished the 
 leading type of monotheism so far for Western nations in 
 its ideal of absolute personal Will. It has thus become in 
 the religious sphere what the Assyrian kings were in the 
 political or military. Christianity, its offspring, held obe- 
 diently to its literature and prophetic inspiration, even after 
 theology had advanced far beyond its national limitations. 
 The development of nationality was by no means easy. 
 The Hebrews were a mixed people — half Arab, half 
 Canaanite — for centuries, and their special Law {tdrdJi) 
 was a slow evolution, but by singularly natural stages, 
 largely from these elements. There was in fact a remark- 
 able absence of break in this process where all has been 
 imagined to be miraculous ; and nothing can so perfectly 
 refute the miraculous theory as the manner in which each 
 stage in Hebrew legislation interlocks with the preceding, 
 from the oldest covenants and simplest free usages on 
 through the Deuteronomic and then to the post-exilian 
 Levitical institutions. Never till the latest epochs had 
 the Hebrews a recognized religious law. The national 
 god had no constitutional support or statute. The influ- 
 ences of the Babylonian exile, as already shown in a pre- 
 vious chapter, were the culminating force to this result, 
 ending in the popular consecration of religion to nation- 
 ality. In the great meetings called by Nehemiah ^ and 
 Ezra after the return from Babylon, the earlier migration 
 covenanted to build a State and establish Jahveh in the 
 centre of his people on a throne of historical laws. 
 
 The early aspirations of the Hebrews after a tribal god 
 are the substance of the Mosaic tradition as now worked 
 over in the Old Testament books. They furnish the key 
 to their Abrahamic call and covenant, to their Exodus 
 epos, to their exchange of the more generic name Elohim 
 for that of Jahveh, as sign of unity, supremacy, holiness. 
 
 ' See Nehemiah, x 29. Kuenen : Religion oi hrael, \\ 229 
 
234 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 It was as natural for them as for the other tribes, all of 
 whom had their local divinities, and all were mixed in the 
 Hebrew mind. It is difficult to describe a process, each 
 step of which has been covered by the succeeding one, and 
 by the reconstruction of ideas, traditions, and literature in 
 a new interest, down to the great reconstruction of the tra- 
 ditions and laws into the Levitical institutions by Ezra 
 and the other priestly scribes, from 538 to 458 B. C, 
 under the influence of the Babylonian exile, and brought 
 to Judea by him at the latter date. 
 
 But we may specially note the great — later, I cannot but 
 think — recognized significance of the name JaJivch, "He 
 that is," with a future as well as present force; in other 
 words, simply the real God, as contrasted with all other 
 national gods, who were rejected because held to be false. 
 It is obvious that the original selection of this term did not 
 imply positive monotheism nor exalted purity ; but it was 
 well fitted, in the developed use of it, to imply the con- 
 centration of thoroughly earnest minds on truth. Here 
 was a germ of moral allegiance, which promised, in Semi- 
 tic hands, to press forward into passionate rejection of that 
 indifference to contrasts of name and quality which inheres 
 in polytheism. In the higher minds at least, it would be 
 developed into an intense hatred for the unconscious im- 
 moralities of old Semitic worship. The moral exaltation 
 of Hebrew prophecy, that grandest gift of Semitism to 
 the human race, was thus in some measure foreshadowed 
 by the Hebrew tribes in their earliest conscious acts of free 
 religious choice. It was not, as Robertson Smith would 
 argue, a supreme proof " that the Old Testament religion 
 is no mere natural variety of Semite monolatry, but a dis- 
 pensation of the true and eternal religion of the spiritual 
 God." ^ It is a perfectly natural Semitic development. 
 They did not stand in the " secret counsel of Jehovah," — 
 
 1 Lectures on Old Testanient., p. 273. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 235 
 
 there is no such secret counsel. They did what ideaUsts 
 do on given conditions. The full ripening and purifica- 
 tion of that noble germ was very gradual. The Jahveh 
 of the later Isaiah was no immediate inspiration of unity 
 and holiness. He grew (as we have already shown) from 
 a beginning not essentially different from the Asshur of 
 Assyria or the Chaldean Adrammelech. His palpable 
 associations were with the solar fires, the destroying and 
 productive forces of Nature, vitalized with conscious pur- 
 pose, omnipotent to create or to kill, knowing no impulse 
 towards the disobedient but to exterminate them,^ and 
 specially determined in his volition by the peculiar for- 
 tunes of the Hebrews in Egypt and Canaan, as well as 
 by the free traditional worship on the high places prac- 
 tised by the tribes to a comparatively late period. Made 
 thoroughly earnest by tribal sufferings and the extremes 
 of desire and defeat, they gradually shook free their ideal 
 from these material investments, and made it at once a 
 supreme personality and a righteous law. But through 
 every subsequent phase it never escapes that first anthro- 
 pomorphic, arbitrary meaning of Jahveh, — a conscious 
 Will, dividing right from wrong, determining the true, re- 
 jecting and destroying the false, with two-edged sword, 
 rewarding obedience and punishing disobedience in ways 
 of its own choosing. This institution of morality and 
 holiness by force of an omnipotent Will is just as true of 
 the Christ of the Last Judgment as of the Jahveh of the 
 Exodus and the Asshur of the Ninevite kings. 
 
 The phases of this natural evolution were determined by 
 the national destinies. The God of Amos, as of the later 
 Isaiah, was an outgrowth of secular causes, a product of 
 the whole history of Hebrew relations with the human 
 race. Whatever cultivated their sense of nationality, 
 those Semitic instincts of personal and tribal will, of 
 
 ^ Genesis, vi. 7. 
 
236 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 exclusiveness in the claim of authority and in the sense 
 of devotion, went to the formation of the rehgious ideal. 
 Its roots therefore are in Canaanite as well as Chaldean 
 soil, and the parallel strata there show the universality of 
 this rule. That seething mixture of humanity and bar- 
 barism in the old Hebrew laws and life was analogous to 
 the combination of military frenzy and industrial ardor 
 in the Assyrio-Babylonian world. And that majesty of 
 righteous law which bowed the souls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 and Jesus, and inspired their immortal protests against the 
 vice and formalism of their times, came slowly in the fires 
 of spiritual experience out of the primal concentrated aim 
 to find a separate tribal god. In this began the sense of 
 holiness. For separateness meant inviolability; in other 
 words, reverence, awe, authority of conscience, and faith. 
 The same word {kddosli) signifies apart, and holy. And 
 that aloofness, which was at first the symbol of tribal pride 
 and ambition, became a purity, which spurned the pre- 
 tences of formal piety and the pride of human tyrannies, 
 and hastened with impartial thunders to the help of the 
 weak and oppressed.^ Thus the petty passions of undis- 
 ciplined and roving clans are slowly transformed into 
 universalities of imrnortal principle. Such is spiritual 
 evolution. Not mere creation of the greater by the less, 
 but the implication of natural intuition, the sacred sense 
 of obligation, the cosmic unsearchable beauty and order 
 in every step of growth. 
 
 Nor is the transformation at an end. Even the high- 
 est forms of thought and feeling in Hebrew experience, 
 as in that of other early races, were very crude stages of 
 this implication. They were conceived as external reve- 
 lations, words of Jahveh spoken to his prophets or his 
 people, and through them to mankind. A divine Will, 
 
 1 So the purity of Ahura in the Avesta is most conspicuous in his abhorrence of sin. 
 Ya^na, xxxi. 13. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 237 
 
 analogous to their human ideal, a voluntary choice be- 
 tween two opposites, a distinctly conceived motive and 
 purpose, impressing itself on man as an instrument, were 
 posited outside man and the world as the ultimate source 
 of truth and ground of righteousness. This personal re- 
 lation was so intensely conceived by the Hebrew prophets, 
 that their language assumed them to be under a divine 
 possession, and took the form of a religious and moral 
 absolutism, imposing enough to bring all civilizations to 
 their feet. But, overwhelming as they are to the anthro- 
 pomorphic instinct, these conceptions have always ignored 
 the direct participation of human nature itself in all the 
 truth and right it is cognizant of, and the impossibility 
 of receiving either the one or the other form of experi- 
 ence from a Will outside of the nature of things and of 
 man. To suppose such a Will, selecting definite methods 
 of education for a special people, and communicating these 
 to chosen instruments, not through experience or study, 
 but by direct influx, was but a Semitic exaggeration or 
 extreme form, though primary, of what has always been, 
 and still is, the popular idea of religious truth. For the 
 notion of personal commandment is here intensified by its 
 connection with the passion for national unity, expressed 
 by a central theocratic ruler, and his extension to world- 
 sway. It was the natural theistic instinct of the Hebrews 
 that made them insist on having a king ; an instinct which 
 a troop of judges or seers could not satisfy. The Semitic 
 God is the divinized king, and when lifted above all earthly 
 kings is the king still ; holy because separate, and awful in 
 the power to do, not as he ought, but as he wills. This is 
 the Hebrew theocracy, so potent in its persistence in the 
 Christian church. I have no doubt that monotheism is, 
 as a rule, reached through tribai or national consciousness, 
 and that Hebrew and Semitic history herein represents a 
 decisive phase in the history of mankind. 
 
238 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 In thus ascribing monotheism in a large degree to a 
 poHtical experience, I do not discredit what is called the 
 intuition of God, which in fact merely takes its conditions 
 therefrom. This intuition cannot properly be defined as 
 teaching any special form of deity ; it is simply the per- 
 ception of substance as higher than phenomena, and as 
 necessary to their existence, and associates itself more 
 and more with the intuition of duty, holiness, right, with- 
 out which no conception of God can exist. Its highest 
 form is the result of the deepest religious and philo- 
 sophical culture. For this reason, no conception of a 
 personal voluntary agent, apart from the universe, can 
 finally satisfy it. Substance, as inscrutable and indefin- 
 able, the infinite reality that underlies all order, beauty, 
 goodness, and contains all intelligence, all principles and 
 laws, is thus, properly speaking, the universal significance 
 of the intuition of God. To this highest form Semitism, 
 in its great religions, does not consciously attain, however 
 it be involved in their logical evolutionary necessities, as 
 in those of all other great faiths of mankind. Not more 
 in the Old Testament of the Hebrews than in the tablets 
 of Asshur, is this pure conception of deity found. The 
 New Testament religion is also worship of a personal 
 Will ; a pure monotheism. It is anthropomorphic, and 
 creates a God in human form outside of and above hu- 
 manity; and, although bringing this God into closer rela- 
 tions with individual feelings and freedom than the older 
 faith from which it grew, does not pursue unity or holi- 
 ness as an ideal with more ardor than did the Hebrew 
 nationality, which required the surrender of all private 
 desires to an all-embracing sovereign Will, separate in its 
 personality from the human soul. 
 
 It is in tracing this passion for national unity in its 
 religious expression, that we learn the vast indebtedness 
 of the Hebrews for their whole religious development to 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 239 
 
 the stimulus of those foreign nationaHties which they re- 
 garded as its foes. The legends in Genesis, which pur- 
 port to give the earliest history of mankind, are palpably 
 shaped by a purpose to identify the passions of Israel 
 with the will of Jahveh as maker and governor of the 
 world. In this marvellous series the sovereign claims of 
 the chosen people are affirmed, and their destiny fixed 
 from the beginning by the Supreme Cause of all things. 
 In the oldest portions there linger polytheistic hints and 
 traditions,^ and there are marks of spontaneous poetic 
 faith which indicate an early origin. But with the crude 
 exclusiveness of the tribe are combined elements of uni- 
 versality, — a conception of history as a whole, a direct 
 recognition of other nations, and of a common origin and 
 interest for all mankind ; an effort to deal, in a simple half- 
 conscious way, indeed, with the problems of social order, 
 of human relations, of life and death, with the law of na- 
 tional retribution and the sense of a secular providence, 
 which can only be explained by the action of some great 
 force in various ways developing and counteracting the 
 primitive instincts and desires. This was Babylon, where 
 the old national traditions were worked up, during the 
 Captivity, under the stress of national sorrows and reviv- 
 ing hopes, amidst a vast concourse of nations {-TrdfxfxiKToq 
 6)(\o<i), their collision of interests, commercial, industrial, 
 military, and their cosmopolitan experience. Here the 
 earnest theism of Persia and its large toleration not only 
 permitted the Hebrew exiles to study their own fortunes 
 and those of the human race in quietness of mind, but 
 even stimulated their productive faculty to the great task 
 
 1 The latest Biblical studies prove conclusively that the present form, and in large degi ee 
 the substance, of the Genesis stories, the special Levitical legislation and the historical 
 books, — in short, the body of the Pentateuch, — is the result of elaboration and construc- 
 tion during and after the exile. But these historical studies of portions of the text are not our 
 main reliance. The more primal origin of the whole series is equally obvious. Earlier 
 borrowing from Babylonian, as well as Canaanite and Phcenician, must explain the basis 
 of these legends. Kuenen : Religion of Israel, ii. 159-168. 
 
240 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 of literary and religious construction, never before fairly 
 undertaken. But besides bearing an important part in the 
 final shaping of the Genesis myths, Assyria and Chaldea 
 were in large degree the sources of their earlier forms. 
 
 The Hebrews themselves conceded to Babylon an im- 
 mense antiquity, as the city of Nimrod,^ in the third gen- 
 eration after Noah.^ It is inferred from the cuneiform 
 inscriptions that a scientific astronomy centred there two 
 thousand years before Christ,^ resting on the zodiac, the 
 division of the great circle into three hundred and sixty 
 degrees, and all the large and small divisions of time 
 known to us, — the planetary week, the gnomon, the solar 
 and lunar years.* According to Diodorus, the Babylonian 
 had conceived of the world as an established divine order, 
 and as regulated by guardian powers, each in his station, 
 planetary or stellar.^ It is obvious that no comparatively 
 rude race like the Hebrew could have come into close 
 relations with a civilization so ancient and so ripe, without 
 drawing largely on its fund of traditional beliefs. Here 
 indeed we find the cradle of Semitism ; the natural key 
 to those imaginative Hebrew myths which have been 
 regarded as the gift of an inspired race to the religious 
 nature of man.^ 
 
 The Genesis story or creation gives a divine authority 
 to the Hebrew Sabbath as the day of rest for the national 
 God after six days creative work.*^ This is manifestly the 
 motive of the distinctive Hebrew legend, which in many 
 respects grew out of the vast elaboration of the Sabbatic 
 idea by the priestly legislation after the exile, though of 
 
 1 Genesis, x. lo. 
 
 ' Carre : L'Ancicn Orient, ii 445. 
 
 * Lenormant : Essai de comtnentaire des fragments cosinogoniqiies, 
 
 * Lenormant : Manual cf Ancient History of the East, ii. 185. 
 ^ Carr^ ." L''Ancie?i Orient, ii. 469, 470- 
 
 ^ It is only in accord with its whole history that the Jewish people have concentrated 
 their highest traditional respect on the Babylonian Gemara (or Commentary on the Mishnah) 
 instead of the Jerusalem. Wiinsche: Der Talmud. 
 
 ' Genesis, i. i ; ii. 3. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 24I 
 
 course the Hebrew Sabbath is not due to this alone, being 
 of far earHer origin.^ But tlie division of days by sevens 
 is far older than the Hebrew Sabbath. It belongs to the 
 earliest fund of' religious traditions. It is not founded on 
 any recurrent period in the order of Nature, yet it is not 
 arbitrary, still less mystical.'^ It is a part of that primi- 
 tive astronomy which was the infantile unity of science 
 and faith, and appears on a gigantic scale in all the cos- 
 mogonies of antiquity. The central figures in this cultus 
 of the stars are the five planets, with the sun and moon, 
 observable among all the heavenly host by their relative 
 change of place and apparent specialty of function. They 
 were symbolized by the seven stages of the Babylonian 
 and Assyrian ziggiirat, or towered temple ; in the seven 
 walls of Babylon, and in the seven days of the week, the 
 seventh day being consecrated as a day of release from 
 labor. An old Accadian calendar,^ probably of the seven- 
 teenth century before Christ, gives the special festival for 
 every day, the seventh being always designated as a Sab- 
 bath i^Sabattu) ; on which the king himself shall not 
 change his garments, nor ride, nor sacrifice, till night, 
 nor even administer the government. From this royal 
 rest appropriated by the Semitic races of Chaldea, it was 
 but a step in the intenser anthropomorphism of the He- 
 brews to make their own God the example of Sabbatic 
 release, and to pronounce it as his command. The sec- 
 ond Jahvistic account of creation^ has more signs of 
 antiquity and originality than the other, and is referred 
 by Kuenen to a possibly earlier period than the exile ; 
 but on doubtful grounds. In the Chaldean cosmogony, 
 as reported by Berosus, ^ in the Phoenician of Sanchoni- 
 
 ' Kuenen: Religion of Israel, ii. 280. 
 
 ° See Philo's absurd reasons for a supposed sanctity in the number seven. Vol. i. chap. 
 xxx.-xliii. 
 
 ' Records of i lie Past, vii. 157. * Genesis, ii- 4, ei seq. 
 
 ° Time of Alexander. Berosus drew his account from ancient sources, and his fragments 
 are preserved in Polyhistor, Arbydenus, and Eiisebius. 
 
 16 
 
242 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 athon, and in the cuneiform inscription, which is now 
 believed to be Assyrian and not Accadian, the beginning 
 of things is the formless chaos, full of incomplete germs 
 and half-made creatures, — Tiamat {Tiamtu of the As- 
 syrians, 77zi<//^^ of Damascius, Thalatta o{ Berosus) mean- 
 ing the sea in the sense of abyss. The Hebrew expression 
 for this first material of the world is Tchom, the same word 
 as Tiamat, and characterized as without form and void. 
 Compare the first sentence of the Genesis story with the 
 cuneiform Creation tablets : ^ — 
 
 " When above were not raised the heavens, and below on the 
 earth a plant had not grown, and the bounds of the abyss had not 
 been opened, the chaos of waters was the producing mother of all 
 things. And tlie waters were gathered into one place. But a tree 
 had not grown : a flower had not unfolded, when the gods had not 
 yet sprung up, and order did not exist. . . . Then were made tiie 
 great gods. All that was done by the great gods was delightful 
 [very good] to them."'' 
 
 " He (Anu) constructed constellations, like figures of animals 
 (zodiac) ; by them dividing the year into twelve months : planets 
 also for rising and setting (" signs "). Wandering stars to shine, 
 harmless, in their courses. He made the gates strong, right and left. 
 He set the moon to rule the night. . . . And the sun arose in glory." 
 
 The lunar phases are perhaps described, yet in a pas- 
 sage extremely obscure;"^ while in another connection 
 there is recorded the institution of the Sabbath,^ though 
 we know from other sources that the seven-day ^\•eek and 
 Sabbath rest are really Accadian institutions for kings and 
 people.^ The close resemblance between this very ancient 
 cosmogony and its Hebrew analogue is broken by the 
 single circumstance that it symbolizes the steps of creation 
 by successive pairs of male and female powers, and seeks 
 
 * Records of the Past, ix. 167. 
 
 2 Smith: Cluildean Account of Genesis. In Sayce's edition (18S0) a different translation 
 is given, p. 57. 
 
 8 Smith: C/t/t7<inin Account of Genesis fSayce), pp. 64, 65. 
 
 « Ibid., p. 30S. 6 Ibid., p. 89. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 243 
 
 to express their stability rather than any special order of 
 production. The successive steps of creation, of which so 
 much has been made by the harmonists, are not very well 
 made out, and their enumeration by days I find myself 
 unable to recognize at all as yet.^ The account, so far as 
 it is rightly interpreted, may however, as Sayce suggests,^ 
 rest on older traditions ; and although of comparatively late 
 Assyrian, not Accadian, origin, it is certainly older than 
 the present form of the Hebrew story. But a fragment, 
 now missing, is believed to have described the emergence 
 of light, atmosphere, land, and plants. 
 
 Finally, man appears, created by Hca, and is commanded 
 to worship daily in fear of his Maker, 
 
 "That they might obey (?), he has created mankind ; the merciful 
 one with whom is hfe. May he establish and never may his word 
 be forgotten in the mouth of the black-headed race whom his hands 
 created." 
 
 •' May he also remove mischief ; may he overcome it for the future. 
 Because all places he made, he pierced, he strengthened. Lord of 
 the world is his name, called even Father Bel. The names of the 
 angels he gave to them." 
 
 " With friend and comrade speech thou makest. In the underworld 
 speech thou makest to the propitious genii. When thou speakest also 
 he will give." •' 
 
 What we must specially notice is that the Chaldean 
 account, as at once combining in one system many 
 primitive elements of belief which do not appear in the 
 Hebrew, and resting upon ideas which could not possibly 
 have been evolved from the Genesis story, is obviously 
 more original, while the Hebrew is its adaptation to the 
 
 1 Of the Iwpothetic number of tablets, only four have been discovered, of which that 
 called the seventh is so called only provisionally ; and those conjectured to be the second and 
 third are in the highest degree doubtful, to the uninitiated eye certainly, affording no evidence 
 whatever of the special-creation works the translators have found in them. (Sayce's Smith: 
 Chaldean Accoicnt of Genesis, pp. 62, 63.) The first ascribes the generation of heaven and 
 earth to "the boundless deep," " the chaos of the sea," conceived as a female, and before the 
 existence of the gods themselves. Ibid., pp. 57, 58. 
 
 ^ Smith: Chaldean A ccotpit of Genesis, p. 22. ^ Ibid. (Sayce), p. 73-7S. 
 
244 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 supremacy of the national God. In Semitic cosmogo- 
 nies, as given by Berosus and others, the water is the 
 first material of creation. The Phoenician and Hebrew 
 " deep " was a waste abyss over which wandered the 
 wind, or breath. So Chaldean and Phoenician civilization 
 began with amphibious deities, having fish heads above 
 the man's ; and the probably Semitic-Polynesian myth 
 makes the father of gods and men fish up the earth from 
 the sca.^ It is obvious that such beliefs as these point to 
 centres of civilization on the seashore. The intimation is 
 confirmed by numerous records going to show that the 
 shores of the Erythraean Sea were the great point of de- 
 parture for civilized Semitism. But the cosmogonies 
 which begin from ocean as a chaotic abyss, contain- 
 ing the germs of things, rest on a wider basis than any 
 such special geographical location. They are found 
 among mountain tribes as well, and at the root of Aryan 
 as well as Semitic mythology, and even of the oldest phi- 
 losophies. Their ocean is the brooding atmosphere of 
 space, conceived as preceding the gathering of all floating 
 seeds of life into a living world,'^ the appointment of plane- 
 tary courses, and the orderly voyage of the Sun scattering 
 the powers of life and growth around him as he moves. 
 Even here water plays an important part. The interest 
 is mainly centred in the conflict of the lightning or the 
 sunbeam with the piled and rolling raincloud, — the storm- 
 struggle which opens the mysterious storehouse of waters 
 hidden in the black roaring deeps. As Indra slays " the 
 enveloping " (Vritra) serpent in the writhing clouds in 
 Hindu mythology, as Tistrya fights the demon Apaosha 
 and expels him from the great sea Vouru-kasha, and Thrae- 
 
 ' Fornander : The Polytzesiizn Race, p. 63. 
 
 - Eckstein {Les Sources de la Cosmogonie de Sattckoniathoti) has explored this field. 
 Berosus' Chaldean cosmogony traces all things back to Thalatta or Tiamat, containing 
 forms of mixed creatures, — a semi-scientific recognition of evolution and prngress from 
 the crude and confused forms of life to higher beauty. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 245 
 
 tona slays Dahaka, both dragons in Iranian, — as Apollo 
 pierces the Python in Greek, — • so Bel divides in two the 
 Serpent (Tiamat), queen of the Chaldean Chaotic Sea. 
 The association of vast resource and far-reaching expan- 
 sion with roaring and rolling waters is as natural for pas- 
 toral as for littoral tribes. Space arid sea are equally 
 parents of these amazing fertilizers and producers ; and 
 similar names and legends would be associated with these 
 infinitudes of living power. ^ 
 
 Look over a boat-side on a breezy day, following the 
 wind out to sea, and you will easily understand the simple 
 instincts to which the waters were the primal cosmogonic 
 element. What productive energy in this undulating mass, 
 vital in every atom ; in these multitudinous waves, so swift 
 to break up sunshine into fiery flakes, and fling it off in a 
 rain of delight ! How mobile this liquid element, obedient 
 to stir of wind, to lead of tide ! To some unseen brooding 
 Will it seems to say, " Shape me as you will, I am ready 
 for your largest purpose, for your light and your law ! 
 And were they not right who said, with foregleam of sci- 
 ence, that the earth was product of water? Are not the 
 green islands its offspring, the continents its heaped sedi- 
 ments, the record of its secular art? Has it not piled 
 the countless layers, — its footfalls, its world-architecture? 
 And as the living creatures came swarming in their times, 
 has it not numbered and fed them and laid them to rest 
 under its gentle rain of atoms, — the continents crumbled 
 as they had been builded by its hand? Well might we 
 fancy this rippling laughter, this pulsing rise and fall, this 
 long commingling and commotion, to be the very quiver 
 of the fecund life swarming beneath, — a life that foreshad- 
 ows all forms elsewhere existing, and has its foretypes of 
 all strivings towards the human, gracious and hateful, noble 
 and mean. How universal the sea ! The very hordes of 
 
 ^ See tlie BiindeAesh story of the sea Vouru-kasha (,vii. xiii.). 
 
246 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 its tide-water pools mirror all greeds and competitions of 
 man, — his Tartar raids, his hermits, and his parasites 
 of thought. Its fine sands mingle scent of sea-weed and 
 stir of minute life, the gleaming dust of shells, and the fric- 
 tion of abraded stone ; no element of that earth-plasm for- 
 got, which is to bloom into herb and flower, and beast and 
 man. Its shores suggest what an infinitude of moods, 
 emotions, aspirations, passions ; what stress of resistance 
 and endeavor ; what tones and harmonies ! The very 
 pebbles it rolls and heaves into barriers to its own march 
 resound monotonous with the familiar, ever unsolved mys- 
 tery of life and death, the cry of whence and whither that 
 ceases not from man's infancy to his latest maturity ; and 
 all is folded in a deeper silence and peace, where the 
 mightiest waste of unrecorded history lays its hand on 
 man's loneliness and fear, with gentle compulsion to trust. 
 The Greeks held Ocean to be the father of Nemesis, — ir- 
 reversible moral sequence; ethical requital. "Retribution," 
 says Sophocles, " grows slowly, like the wave that rolls up 
 the black sand." All nations have used it as the symbol not 
 only of slow retributory law, but of wisdom hid in fathom- 
 less depths, — Mimir-wells, where the eye even of a god is 
 lost in gaining it ; of strength from patient discipline, of 
 toil that earns the victory, of far ventures for ideal ends, — 
 man's eternal monitor to courage and progress. 
 
 For the sea is no mere heap of salted waves ; it is an 
 idea ; nor would it otherwise have been the mighty reser- 
 voir of mythology and faith. How full is man's speech 
 and song of its ideal meaning as lord of wisdom and pro- 
 vidence ! Glaucus the mythic fisherman, longing for an 
 ocean birth, and fascinated by the taste of briny plants, 
 became a sea-god, blessing the people of the isles and 
 shores with divine forewarnings ; builder too of that mys- 
 tic Argo which bore the tragic freight of sympathies and 
 conquests for the Mediterranean races. All the old sea- 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 247 
 
 gods are prophets and teachers of the arts of life. Out 
 of ocean-depths comes up Cannes, Cadmus, Melkarth of 
 Tyre. Into them sails away Mexican Quetzalcoatl, fugitive 
 from the world he has blessed, to return in better days. 
 Out of deluge-waters emerge good men, in arks and with 
 sacred words unlost, to re-people and rebuild the earth. 
 Out of the welter of a ruined world, the twilight of the 
 Scandinavian gods, uprise new isles, in whose springing 
 grass are hid the dice of Destiny unharmed. So new 
 religions rise from the chaos of outworn beliefs, to prove 
 the eternal youth of the soul, whose births are cyclic, like 
 the returning tides. Proclus said with reason that " Ocean 
 is the cause of all motion, intellectual and natural." To 
 the ancients these symbols were the ocean itself; for the 
 moderns they must be read between the hnes of its visible 
 outward movement. 
 
 Thus conceived, the primal deep, whether of sky or sea, 
 is not a material waste, but a prolific idea, in the religious 
 consciousness of man. Whether personal Will, which in 
 the Chaldean, Phoenician, and the Hebrew cosmogony is 
 the creative force, ^ is emphasized as the organizer of 
 chaos {Bel), or as shaper of it (E/o/iim) in the beginning, 
 — whether as a mysterious desire {Pothos) inspiring it, or as 
 Tauthe, the intelligible creator who brings wisdom into the 
 Phoenician world of man, — is not matter of essential dif- 
 ference. The Chaldean Chaos, as well as the Phoenician, is 
 itself conceived as a person ; and so is the Hebrew Chaos. 
 " Creation out of nothing," that intense monotheism which 
 has been ascribed to the Elohistic will, is indeed as con- 
 trary to primitive intuition as it is to science ; ^ it is a 
 
 1 How much more strongly pronounced is this element of Will here than in Hindu 
 mythology, which draws the world out of the One, — the unity of Being, "breathing not," 
 neither " existence nor non-being," creating the worlds with a thought ! Hesiod, again, like 
 the Phoenician, rests creation, not on will, but on desire or love. It is in the Avesta that is 
 seen this Aryo-Semitic will-power fully recognized as the creative force. 
 
 ^ The Hebrew word bara. rendered '' created," properly meant shaped-, out of some given 
 material, and so brought forth thence. See Fiirst and Gesenius. 
 
248 DEVELOPMENT, 
 
 modern abstraction unknown to the Hebrew myth, as to 
 the other analogous ones, from El to Zeus. In these 
 cases the abyss remains behind the personal act, which 
 shapes it to orderly heaven and earth. And the imagi- 
 native aspect in which the abyss presents itself forbids 
 us to regard it, so far at least, as a materialistic concep- 
 tion: Nature was full of personal, human meaning, the 
 invincible Pothos or Eros of the Phoenician and Greek. ^ 
 The difference seems to be that in the Chaldean creation 
 this personality is divided into a series, beginning with 
 chaos conceived as female; while in the Hebrew it has 
 completer unity through all stages, as Elohim conceived 
 as a man. Even this unity is of later origin, and the very 
 plurality of Elohim is strong evidence of an original con- 
 currence of many wills. The stricter monotheism belongs 
 to the prophetic and post-exilian theology, and is certainly 
 the Jahvistic elaboration of ideas closely resembling the 
 Chaldean. 
 
 That half-disguised personal Will in the Chaldean Tia- 
 mat, at the beginning, is worthy of notice. Damascius^ 
 
 — who derived his Chaldean cosmogony from ancient 
 sources — gives a series of male and female principles, 
 preceding the positively creative work, which coincide 
 with the birth of primal gods in the tablet inscriptions, 
 
 — all centring in Tiamat, the living abyss. From these 
 comes Belus, the demiurge or positive framer of things. 
 The imagination of the ancient world always filled up the 
 unity or space of religious conceptions with multiplica- 
 tions of names, either of special functions or successive 
 generations or times. So Elohim says, " Let ^ls make 
 man in our image, after our likeness." But personality is 
 always involved. To suppose that by chaos a material 
 origin is intended, is a delusion read into the old texts. 
 
 1 Cory : A ncient Fragments, p. 92. 
 
 2 Lenormant: Chaldean Magic, pp. 122, 123. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 249 
 
 Early mythology is imaginative, and never conceives of 
 creation otherwise than as the evolutionary act of living 
 force ; not always of direct personal volition, but of life 
 in some form. The cosmos itself swarms with individual 
 being, and there is nothing inert or dead. Desire is as 
 old as the world, and inherent in its elements. Intelli- 
 gence lives in the plasmic germ, and does not wait for 
 man's upright form to hold it. The waters of Tiamat 
 teem with strange monsters, not accounted for save by 
 her living sway. Order enters when Bel, the male prin- 
 ciple, proceeds to divide her substance, destroying the 
 crude abortions of the dark, and separates heaven and 
 earth, slaying her dragon life, in whose far-stretching 
 monstrous folds all elements were involved. A Hebrew 
 reminiscence of this myth survives in the seventy-fourth 
 Psalm, where God is praised for breaking the heads of the 
 sea-monsters, and notably giving the dead leviathan for 
 meat to his people; and again, in the prophecy of Isaiah^ 
 concerning Babylon, where judgment is invoked upon her 
 as "leviathan, the piercing serpent, and the dragon that is 
 in the sea." The pictures of the sea-monster in the one 
 hundred and fourth Psalm and in Job ^ may be added in 
 proof of this traditional association of the waters with 
 monsters of uncontrolled power, — quite as likely to be a 
 reminiscence of the chaos-myth of Bel and Tiamat as of 
 the Egyptian crocodile. The grand intuition, here worth 
 all other mythic elements together, is the universal deriva- 
 tion of order from strife and strength of Will, from oldest 
 Ophion and Cronos to Hellenic Zeus, — the supreme secret 
 of philosophy and conduct, the meaning of Dualism in all 
 ages of the world. Not less striking is the human form 
 given in both cosmogonies, and the rationality of man as 
 partaking of the Divine mind. Elohim creates man in his 
 own (physical) image; and in the second account, Jahveh- 
 
 ' Isaiah, xxvii. i. 2 job, xli. ; iii. S. 
 
250 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Elohim makes him out of his breath and the dust of the 
 earth. In both cases the materials are palpably sensuous, 
 and the likeness is doubtless mainly physical.^ So in the 
 Polynesian-creation myth, which follows the Hebrew, even 
 in details.^ Man, whether formed of dust and breath, or 
 of earth and brain, can be like his Maker only in the sense 
 that the latter is in human form, a colossal omnipotent 
 man; and this is precisely the fact concerning the con- 
 versing, walking, planning, and punishing powers of the 
 Hebrew Jahveh-Elohim. 
 
 But here again the substance is ideal ; and the root and 
 type of man is found in the highest known personal life. 
 The intenser monotheism of the Hebrew Creator, as com- 
 pared with the Babylonian, who represents a brotherhood 
 of gods, is due in part to a stronger sense of tribalism, 
 and partly to the combination of Persian Ormuzd-worship 
 with the prophetic spirit fostered in the Hebrews by the 
 exile. The Avesta legend of creation, deriving man and 
 woman ^ from the blood of the Bull (genius of earth), is 
 a comparatively late construction of primitive Aryan 
 myths.* But the older theism of the Yagnas, in the sec- 
 ond part,^ is quite pure enough, as well as sufficiently 
 spiritual and practical, to have had a large part in the 
 formation of the highest Jahvistic conceptions. Ahura- 
 mazda is upholder of the pure creation, and first fash- 
 ioner of the same ; to him belongs all that is best and 
 fairest,- — the good spirit, the good law, the good wis- 
 dom, the kingdom and the power.*^ Nothing could have 
 helped the Hebrew mind to positive monotheism so 
 powerfully as this Persian god. The order of his crea- 
 tion, however, as described in the nineteenth Yagna and 
 
 1 Von Bohlen : Genesis, p. 18. 
 
 ^ Fornander : The Polynesian Race, p. 6i. 
 
 3 Mashya and Mashyana are generic terms for man and woman, like Adam and Eve. 
 
 * Darmesteter: Ortnazd ei A hriman, p. 287, ei seg. 
 
 ^ Ya(na, xxviii. et seq. 5 Ibid., xix. ; xliv. i ; xxxvii. ; xliii. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEA: 
 
 developed in the much later Bundehesh, has but slight 
 resemblance to the Hebrew. It is completed not in six 
 days, but in three hundred and sixty-five ; and its order 
 is as follows, — heaven, water, earth, the Bull (cattle), 
 trees, fire, pure man ; and it is very doubtful if, in its 
 oldest form, this order represented a succession in time. 
 Still, there are points of resemblance : Creation is pro- 
 duced in six periods, Gahanbars taking up a year. 
 
 Seen in the strong light of modern worship of an Infi- 
 nite Person, this Hebrew story of creation is in the highest 
 degree poetic. A will analogous to the human brings all 
 things into being by word of mouth. "Let there be light: 
 and there was light." " In the beginning God created the 
 heaven and the earth." The idea of such creative word is 
 common to the Hebrew and the Persian (^Dcbar-J^ahveh 
 and AJmna-vairya are kindred conceptions), and to all 
 races which worship pure Will, in distinction from im- 
 personal ideas or principles, which were represented in 
 ancient time, on the other hand, by the Hindu conception 
 of the world as creation by pure thought. But we must 
 remember that this conception of the cosmos is neither 
 intellectually nor scientifically true. To say that the world 
 is made by the word of God is no truer than to say that 
 it is made by the sword of Bel-Merodach, cutting off his 
 own head, or dividing the female principle from the male. 
 Days, in any sense, do not exist before the sun ; nor light 
 earlier than the seeing eye of man ; nor the heavenly 
 firmament or the grass of the field before the sun and 
 moon. And probably when the truths of evolution, the 
 sciences of unfolding laws, are truly conceived, the eter- 
 nal unity of the world with its substance will require no 
 such anthropomorphic images to express its sublimity; 
 these will cease to be poetically sublime, because sup- 
 planted both in the poetic and the philosophic mind by 
 forms more adequate to the sense of truth. " The world," 
 
2 52 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 says even Philo, " could not have been created in time, 
 because it is itself necessary to relations of time, and the 
 heavens themselves mean mind." 
 
 The purely human interest of the Hebrew story appears 
 more fully in the second account of creation, in which 
 God is called Jahveh-Elohim.^ It centres in the forma- 
 tion ol man It would explain, out of the national con- 
 ception of deity, how man is closely related to this God ; 
 how he comes to be gifted with speech, so as to name 
 creatures and things, and how woman comes to be inferior 
 and dependent. In the first account nothing is said of 
 distinction between the sexes ; nor is there any hint of 
 Adam's intimacy with the Maker, and of the gifts and 
 commands that attest it. Other differences have been 
 ingeniously noted,^ not so important nor so certain, — that 
 the first account appears to belong to a river country (like 
 Babylon), where water would naturally be held the first 
 condition of things ; and the last to a dry-land, where pro- 
 duction seems spontaneous or instantaneous, where men 
 and trees might seem formed from the dust, and mists 
 from the earth, not rain, water the land. More striking 
 is the very sensuous conception of Jahveh-Elohim,^ and 
 the mystical etymology of the name of woman {'ishd) 
 from that of man {'is/i)} 
 
 I. In view of the manifest dependence of the Hebrew 
 story of creation on Persian influence, as well as on a devel- 
 oped nationality, we can hardly be mistaken in regarding 
 the elements which it has in common with the Chaldean 
 legend as borrowed from the latter, rather than as sug- 
 gesting it. And this judgment is confirmed by the an- 
 tiquity of the cuneiform record, and by the confession of 
 the Hebrews as to their original home, the locality of their 
 Eden, and the point of departure for varieties of tribes and 
 
 * Genesis, ii.-iii. ^ Von Bohlen. 
 
 * Genesis, ii. 18-21; iii 8. * Ibid., ii. 23. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 253 
 
 languages at Babylon. The assertion of Ravvlinson,^ that 
 " the inspired author of Genesis has preserved the genuine 
 account of a primeval tradition of creation common to 
 the race, while the Chaldeans disfigured it with evident 
 mythology, such as the cleaving of the woman Thalatth 
 in twain, and the beheading of Belus," betrays notions of 
 the receptivity of primeval man for information as to his 
 own origin for which science can have little respect. The 
 origin of such assumptions in preconceived ideas of Bib- 
 lical infallibility is obvious. A purer example of elaborate 
 mythological construction than the Hebrew story of Crea- 
 tion can hardly be imagined. But beyond Chaldean anti- 
 quity, into the mists of prehistoric time, it is idle and 
 impossible to follow this myth of creation.^ 
 
 II. The Eden Legend^ testifies to its origin in the vi- 
 cinity of the Euphrates and Tigris, — the names of the 
 other two rivers being words that simply mean " flowing 
 waters," and used as generic terms for the purpose of 
 making up the number four, the conventional sign of 
 completeness in all Eastern mythologies. It has been 
 noted that the mention of the name Euphrates, without 
 comment, as already well known, points to a Babylonian 
 origin. The conjecture of Von Bohlen that Eden is Eran, 
 with the change of r into d, is less probable. Eden cor- 
 responds with Persian " parks," but not with the Avesta 
 paradise of Yima, which is a form of social relations and 
 polity conceived as ideally perfect, free from sin and dis- 
 ease, the heaven of a few pure Zoroastrian disciples. The 
 Genesis myth is in fact a conscious generalization of his- 
 tory, with the purpose of explaining moral evil and the 
 stern necessity of labor as results of disobedience to a 
 
 * Aiicietii Monarchies, '\- 144. 
 
 * See Halevy [Rev. Crit. d'Hisioire et de Literature, December 13, 18S0 ) 
 
 * Sir H. Rawlinson, in 1S69, deduced from the cuneiform inscriptions the full conviction 
 that the Genesis paradise was meant to be Gan-Duniyas or Babylonia ; and the belief is not 
 now seriously opposed. 
 
254 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 personal commandment. Crude as the idea was, it came 
 to be combined with the really philosophical notion of 
 bringing the living creatures to man to receive their names. 
 And this alone would indicate the late origin of the story. 
 It has evidently grown out of developed views of the pri- 
 macy of mind over matter, of a natural harmony of man 
 with the universe, and his dependence on conformity with 
 its laws. 
 
 When we add that the terms " Eden " and " Garden of 
 God " belong especially to the exile-period,^ it becomes 
 very certain that the myth received its distinctive form 
 in the midst of the advanced civilization of Babylon. This 
 philosophical interest in the problems of life and charac- 
 ter apparent in the Genesis legends as a whole, could 
 hardly have been combined with the childlike qualities 
 originally conspicuous in them without a long period of 
 incubation in a much wider horizon than the narrow 
 nationality of the Hebrew could supply. But behind the 
 whole, and determining its animus, is the nomadic temper- 
 ament, jealous of its license, hating labor, and relucting at 
 its slow conditions ; trusting spontaneous Nature, and ab- 
 sorbed in the imperious will of a tribal chief; making 
 protest against inevitable contact with a more complex 
 and progressive civilization. Thus far, nothing corre- 
 sponding to the Genesis paradise has been found in the 
 cuneiform records, but it is hardly possible that such a 
 feature should be wholly vv^anting. 
 
 III. These elements come out more forcibly in the 
 Legend of the Temptation and Fall. We have here the 
 Hebrew, and more distinctly the Semitic, conception of 
 the origin of evil, in a rebellious conflict of the will of man 
 against the will of God, his Creator. No other or deeper 
 ground enters into the theory of this legend ; no reason 
 for the command to abstain from the tree of knowledge 
 
 ^ Ezekiel, x;;vi!i. 13. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 255 
 
 but the arbitrary will of God ; no explanation of disobe- 
 dience but the arbitrary will of man. In the Avesta it is 
 the falsehood of the tempter's teaching that makes the sin 
 of yielding to it. In Genesis, what the tempter teaches 
 is true, and the sin is simply in the refusal of the human 
 will to be led by the Divine. Ahriman does not rebel 
 against the will of Ahura as such ; he chooses the dark 
 as Ahura chooses the light, — the one the false, the other 
 the true. In both cases, the origin of moral evil is in 
 disobedience to a personal Will ; but in the Avesta the 
 rights of this Will rest on the deeper ground of truth and 
 light ; in Genesis they have no ground be}^ond themselves. 
 Thus in the Persian the ethical claim dominates and ex- 
 plains the personal ; in the Hebrew, the personal is abso- 
 lute and all-controlling. The older Avesta has nothing 
 corresponding to the special legend of Adam's fall. In 
 the later Bundehesh, the story of Mashya and Mashyana 
 has few resemblances to it beyond the facts that in both 
 stories a primitive couple, born innocent and taught the 
 right way, are tempted by the power of evil, break the 
 law of duty, and are punished. In one case the punish- 
 ment is by expulsion from Eden ; in the other, by demoral- 
 ization of habits, and by condemnation at last to hell, the 
 details of which are given in the Bundehesh.^ In neither 
 case is there the slightest approach to a solution of the 
 great problem of evil. 
 
 Again, the ethnic distinction already noticed between 
 Iranian and Hebrew conceptions is here well illustrated, 
 (i) The cause of Yima's fall is " lying speech," as in itself 
 the crime of crimes ; while that of Adam consists in dis- 
 obedience to the special command of an arbitrary Will to 
 refrain from a certain kind of food. Aryan worship of 
 personal power is wont to find some foothold in the nature 
 of things as foundation of moral allegiance, while the in- 
 
 1 Chap. XV. 
 
256 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 tense Semitic form of the same worship rests on the pure 
 rights of an absolute Will. (2) In the Paradise from which 
 Yima falls, labor is the blessed condition of freedom from 
 age, disease, and sin ; and Yima's toils fill his dominion 
 with seeds and harvests, with cattle and men innumerable. 
 In the Adamic Eden, God himself has planted the garden, 
 which man has only to dress, and keep, being bidden to 
 eat freely of every tree of the garden but of the tree of 
 the knowledge of good and evil. And labor becomes the 
 penalty he incurs in being exiled from it; the cause of 
 exile from the nomadic heaven of exemption from man- 
 ual work, — a free roving life in Nature. Here, as in the 
 succeeding legends, especially that of the murder of Abel, 
 the nomad signifies his dislike of the settled agriculturist 
 and industrial races, his reaction against that Babylonian 
 civilization, probably, from which he had emigrated in the 
 early time. The later experiences of the Captivity fostered 
 the inborn instinct. And the subtile myth in its present 
 form consciously reproves the curiosity of man for knowl- 
 edge as sin against an imminent Will, whose prerogative 
 it is to govern through jealous monopoly of the wisdom 
 that entitles to sway. It has even been said that the hatred 
 of the nomad for labor was the source of the story of the 
 Fall. This hatred of labor was transmitted to the later 
 Jews, who, however, escape the old prejudice in their 
 Talmud.^ 
 
 The childish fear of a tribal god has become developed 
 by later associations — among which subjection to a highly 
 enlightened conquering state was not the least impressive 
 — into the conception that progress in knowledge is marked 
 by Divine displeasure as sin; and the recklessness of the 
 nomad for the morrow survives all experiences of a better 
 culture, ending as it began in pronouncing labor a curse, 
 and warning against that desire to know, that curiosity 
 
 1 Schreiber : Talmud, p. 46. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 257 
 
 to construct and aspire, of which labor is the instrument 
 and the crown. At the same time, the Hebrew had been 
 obHged to admit that this form of hfe makes men resemble 
 gods, and that the arts and inventions of society have pro- 
 ceeded from these apparent crimes against the nomad and 
 his rights. Cain built a city east of Eden and called it 
 Enoch, after his first descendant (compare Assyrian e7iiLk, 
 "wise"), an evident reference to Chaldean centres; and 
 his subsequent line discover music and metallurgy.^ All 
 this Jahveh has cursed as the fruit of fratricide, the 
 martyrdom of the nomad. Such the connection of the 
 Hebrew legend with historical and ethnic relations. 
 
 Nothing, however, answering to the Genesis Fall of 
 Man has yet been discovered in Chaldean inscriptions 
 or traditions. The Deluge is, perhaps ; it would seem 
 so from one passage, — " the doer of sin bore his sin, 
 the blasphemer bore his blasphemy." ^ But the figures 
 supposed by Smith to represent the temptation scene — 
 the man and woman under the tree eating fruit, with the 
 serpent erect behind them — turns out not to picture the 
 two sexes ; and the Creation-tablet, referred to the same • 
 idea by Smith, is now shown by Oppert to require a very 
 different translation.^ Nevertheless, Lenormant finds very 
 close resemblance to the old naturalistic use of the ser- 
 pent as the representative of evil and temptation.^ And 
 his zeal for orthodoxy leads him to emphasize the idea 
 that the inspired writer of Genesis, in making this use of 
 an unhistorical tradition among the old races around him, 
 was moved solely by the desire to give it a moral mean- 
 ing, in explaining the Fall of Man through misuse of evil 
 
 ' Genesis, iv. 16-22. 
 
 * Smith : The CfuildeciK Accmint 0/ Genesis, Izdubar col. v. 15, p. 2SS (Sayce). 
 3 Ibid., p. 75. 
 
 * Les origiiies de Vhistoire, p. 93. Very similar representations have been found on 
 Roman sarcophagi, imitated by early Christian artists, of the Fall, and on a Phoenician vase 
 of the sixth century before Christ, discovered by Di Cesnola in Cyprus. 
 
 17 
 
258 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 will. And this he thinks has been the " only " solution of 
 this redoubtable problem " to be found in history." ^ 
 
 The various motives combined in the story of the Fall 
 show it to be the result of late elaboration. The shame 
 at sexual relations alone Avould mark a late origin. Could 
 such ascetic quality be natural to the Hebrews? What 
 other infantile people ever coupled the desire of knowl- 
 edge with shame at discovering their own nakedness? 
 But we may now recognize the elements which point to 
 a very ancient fund of Semitic beliefs. The attempt to 
 justify the dependence of woman upon man, " bone of my 
 bone, and flesh of my flesh," by making her from his rib, 
 and to hold her responsible for his violation of a command 
 which the legend does not pretend that she had heard, 
 appears to indicate a dogmatic motive rather than an early 
 instinct. But the martyrdom and fall alike of Semitic 
 gods and heroes are always mythically associated with 
 the female as instrument of the evil fate, as we have 
 already shown. Far back in Accadian times, the epic 
 hero Izdubar refuses the love of the goddess on account 
 of the innumerable woes caused by her enchantments 
 and temptations. But in one respect this older dispar- 
 agement of the female element differs from that of the 
 Genesis legend. It refers moral evil back to the lower 
 passions in human nature ; while the other, in conformity 
 with the general spirit of Hebrew thought, makes it a 
 positive wilful revolt against higher will. The Persians 
 had no such associations with the female sex, as respon- 
 sible for man's fall. Falsehood, not woman, was the wea- 
 pon of Ahriman ; by that he corrupted Yima, by that he 
 seduced Mashya and Mashyana from their primitive inno- 
 cence. In this later legend of Creation the sexes were 
 so united as to be indistinguishable, and only quarrel 
 after Ahriman has deluded both.^ 
 
 ' Lenormant : Les origines de Pkisioire, p. loS. ' Bundcliesh, xv. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 259 
 
 The choice of the serpent, in human form, as tempter 
 of Eve to become equal with God, might seem a natural 
 selection of the great type of intelligence throughout 
 antiquity, to represent that forbidden thirst for knowl- 
 edge which was the Hebrew's peculiar dread. But so 
 special a reason is not required. The name ndchdsJi (ser- 
 pent) is Aryan. 1 The serpent belongs to the Ahrimanic 
 creation, and is even Ahriman himself, — the symbol be- 
 ing easily traceable to the hostile meaning of the wreathed 
 rain-withholding cloud in that incessant atmospheric war- 
 fare of light with darkness round which Aryan mythology 
 revolves. It is extremely probable that the Semitic hate 
 of the serpent rests primitively on these same apparently 
 universal phenomena. But the direct origin of the latter 
 is evidently in Chaldean traditions. The two-edged swords 
 of the cherubim are identical with the winged bulls of the 
 Assyrian palaces ; ^ and though there is no miention of a 
 forbidden Tree of Knowledge, there is at any rate a Tree 
 of Life both in the tablet monuments and in the legends. 
 The old Babylonian seal represents two figures sitting be- 
 side a tree and holding out their hands to its fruit, while 
 a serpent is in the background. That the date of these 
 Chaldean elements must be at least 2000 years B. C. is 
 attested by numerous seals and inscriptions. The ser- 
 pent Ophion, first a god, precipitated into the sea by 
 Cronos, holds the position of evil power in the Phoenician 
 mythology. In contrast with these traditions, strong proof 
 of the comparatively late origin of the Hebrew story is to 
 be found in a complexity of structure and purpose, which 
 even the simplicity of its elements and style cannot cover, 
 — the prostration of the serpent, and its thoroughly dog- 
 matic explanation ; the manifest purpose to justify the 
 subjection of woman ; the punishment of man for yielding 
 
 1 It is given by the Buddhists lo the primitive tribes of India and Thibet. 
 * Lenormant : Les origines de VhUtoire d^apris la Bible, p. 129. 
 
260 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 his will to the sex which should represent the passive as 
 he the active elements ; the jealous God, deliberately test- 
 ing his offspring, and enforcing an obedience which 
 touches hidden springs of character; the pains of child- 
 bearing, the burden of toil, referred to highly artificial 
 causes in human disobedience to arbitrary will. Here is 
 obviously the result of an elaborate construction to meet 
 a state of mind in which religious preconceptions and 
 speculative questions were curiously intermingled. The 
 air of simplicity is due to that intense consciousness of 
 personal relations with God which the Hebrew inherited 
 in his Semitic nationalism. This imminent personal Will 
 is distinctly human ; walks in the garden, converses, gives 
 way to emotions ; guards his exclusive right to immortal 
 life by Chaldean cherubim and waving sword. Of course, 
 the cherubim are the winged creatures at the gates of 
 Assyrian palaces, and the sword is the weapon of Bel 
 which " waved four ways." ^ The autocratic jealousy 
 which says, " Behold now ! man is become like one of 
 us," differs most decidedly from the aristocratic con- 
 tempt of Zeus for that " wretched race of men " whoni 
 Prometheus had exalted. Greek mythology, indeed, ex- 
 plains the dark side of nature and life by the jealousy 
 of its Olympian powers. Pallas and Hera and Poseidon 
 are jealous deities ; and from the play of their exclu- 
 sively human loves and hates come the wars and woes 
 of mortals, the tragedy and epos of the world.^ But 
 the balance of powers and tendencies in polytheism 
 involved these conflicts of motives and claims : they tes- 
 tify to an inward protest against exclusiveness in the in- 
 terest of beauty and freedom. The jealousy of Jahveh is 
 immitigable, and cannot relent in face of opposition ; 
 it is absolute as his unity, as arbitrary as his creative 
 will. 
 
 ^ Records of the Past, ix. p 136. * See Odyssey, v. 119. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 261 
 
 Modern theology, dating from Paul of Tarsus, has read 
 into this doctrinal myth of the expulsion from Eden a 
 more startling dogma, of which it is entirely innocent, — 
 that of the representative Fall of the first man, and its con- 
 sequence, inherited sin ; of which the theory of redemption 
 through an incarnate God is the necessary correlative. A 
 striking instance of the Bibliolatry with which scientific 
 studies are still confused and disabled, is in Lenormant's 
 elaborate collection of mythologic resemblances in the 
 description of the Fall of Man by various races, ^ to 
 prove that an original tradition, revealed to men, " of 
 the events by which the fate of humanity was decided," 
 preserved " in a mysterious symbolic memory," had been 
 distorted by the spirit of error among the Gentiles, and 
 partially among the Hebrews also, but restored to its true 
 significance " by the inspired author of Genesis." It 
 should be needless to say that no such events are shown, 
 nor is any " symbolic memory" of them proved; and that 
 the version of the Fall in Genesis has no monopoly ot 
 ethical or spiritual meaning. 
 
 The leading purpose of the legend seems to have been 
 to bring out of Adam a twofold race, — one representing 
 the accursed slaves of labor, the other the happy favorites 
 of freedom. The grudge of the nomadic against the set- 
 tled races, which thus betrays itself in the penalty of the 
 Fall and in the overthrow of Babel, is more boldly con- 
 fessed in the story of Cain and Abel, whose very names 
 express the antagonism. This prejudice appropriated to 
 its uses the old wide-spread myth of the foundation of 
 cities by fratricides, whose diffusion equals that of the 
 Deluge, yet is not used by Lenormant to prove a primi- 
 tive revelation, because it would hardly suit his purpose. 
 Its real meaning consists, of course, in the social antag- 
 onism of the settler and the nomad. As we go on, the 
 
 * Contemporary Review, September, 1879. 
 
262 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 proofs multiply of a Hebrew reaction against that splendid 
 industrial civilization from which the materials for these 
 stories were inevitably drawn. No less striking is the con- 
 trast with the agricultural tendencies of the Avesta. The 
 reaction referred to was in fact a reinsistence, in the inter- 
 est of national association, on the beliefs and habits of a 
 tribe which, wandering from its Chaldean home, made 
 the deserts and mountains of northern Mesopotamia its 
 halting-place, where it unfolded that antagonism between 
 the inhabitants of highlands and those of plains along the 
 navigable streams, which belongs to early epochs in Aryan 
 and Semitic races alike. This antagonism, too, had much 
 to do in producing the famous genealogy of nations in the 
 tenth chapter of Genesis, and is clearly traceable in the 
 distinct parallelism of the names of the two lists of Adam's 
 sons, — the Sethites and Cainites, — in which each name is 
 slightly modified in the one list to produce an opposite 
 moral meaning to that which it bears in the othcr.^ 
 
 In the list of Shem's descendants this is not so evi- 
 dent. The names of the ten patriarchs had their fore- 
 type in Chaldean tradition. The ten antediluvian kings 
 of Berosus' chronology cover four hundred and thirty-two 
 thousand years, — evidently an astronomical cycle,^ the 
 great year of the stars,^ — and their nam.es have been inge- 
 niously derived* from the animals of the zodiacal and side- 
 real signs, first marked and named by the Chaldeans. The 
 same number of progenitors appears in most ancient cos- 
 mogonies, — in the Persian Peshdadians, the Hindu great 
 gods, the ancestors of Odin, the Chinese mythic kings. 
 But whatever their astronomical meaning, the names of 
 these Chaldean antediluvian kings are mostly compounds 
 of Anu, oldest and chief of Chaldean gods. The number 
 
 1 Lenormant : Les origines de Phistoire d' npris la Bible,-p. iSi. Von Bolilen : Gc7iesis. 
 
 ^ Lenormant : Essai des fragments cozutogonigues, p. 230. Died. Sic ii. p. 36. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 216. * Ibid., pp. 249, 250. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 263 
 
 ten has a universal mythic vahie, which has even been 
 traced back to the name for the fingers of the hand.^ The 
 only direct point of attachment of the ten Hebrew patri- 
 archal names with these solar traditions is the lifetime of 
 Enoch, which has precisely the length of a solar year. 
 Yet not only their undoubted origin, but their elaboration 
 at Babylon, must have associated them with physical and 
 even solar phenomena.^ Some of them are found to be 
 Babylonian and Phoenician.^ They were taken from a 
 pre-existing fund of materials for mythic construction, 
 since they are mainly the same with the previous list 
 of Cain's descendants, and have been used to serve very 
 different purposes in such construction. The main point 
 is that they are now shown to have belonged to the so- 
 called "Book of Origins," compiled by a priestly writer 
 in the Captivity. The very limited lifetimes ascribed to 
 the patriarchs, as compared with the Chaldean kings,* 
 indicate that the purpose of this writer was not like that 
 of the latter enumerator, to fill up the vast void of past 
 time with human or divine lives, but a very different one; 
 probably to show that disobedience has gradually dimin- 
 ished the actual duration of a lifetime, and to exalt Jahveh 
 as ordainer of the law that virtue assured length of years, 
 and vice early death. God's spirit would not endure long 
 strife with evil-doing; and so from Adam to Abraham, 
 the allotted period shrinks from nine centuries to less than 
 two. 
 
 These mythic procedures do not yield us any light on 
 the transition from patriarchal to civil forms of govern- 
 ment, nor should we expect any such historic or political 
 
 ' Eckstein : Les Sources de. la Cosmo^onie de Sanchoniathon. 
 
 ^ Goldziher : I^Iythology among the Hebrews, pp. 18, ig. 
 
 3 Smith : The Chaldean Account of Genesis (Sayce), p. 316. 
 
 * Lenormant imagines that he finds one of the exact scales on which these earlier cyclic 
 numbers were diminished by the Hebrew mythologer {Les Origines de Vhistoire, etc., 
 p. 276) in the reckoning of each patriarch's life down to the birth of his oldest son. Oppert 
 thinks he put a week for every five years of the Babylonian figures (Ibid., p. 277). 
 
264 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 sense in the Hebrew tribes. We have here simply a 
 genealogical tree of the Hebrew race, constructed on the 
 principles already stated, to meet the demand for some 
 account of that primeval epoch which the religious 
 importance of the Deluge made of high interest. 
 
 IV. In view of the derivation of all things from a watery 
 chaos at the divine command, the notion of Floods over- 
 whelming disobedient races, whose life had proved the 
 failure of this creative process, was perfectly natural. 
 The fact that many races, especially Semitic and Aryan, 
 have the idea embodied in myths, does not prove a com- 
 mon origin, still less a primeval revelation. It was sim- 
 ply a recurrence of the mind to the primitive waste and 
 disorder, as a state which would give opportunity to the 
 good-will of God to evoke a new human order by a repe- 
 tition of the first process, or by one analogous to the first. 
 The large significance given by ancient mythology to the 
 term ocean, would make it easy for a people dwelling be- 
 side great rivers like the Euphrates and Tigris to ascribe 
 world-wide destructive effects to their inundations, and to 
 make these the basis of moral and social renewal. The 
 class of myths to which the Deluge belongs grows out of 
 the demand of the human mind for cyclic movement, 
 for rhythmic recurrence of conditions, as a sign of con- 
 tinued purpose, harmonious relation, and providential 
 care. The safe return of the circle into itself guarantees 
 perfect order. So the soul is set to rhythms of its own, 
 and instinctively seeks alternation in the destinies of the 
 cosmos as in the details of experience. It keeps con- 
 stant regard to its past steps, will have familiar nodes, 
 recurrent refrains, that make its movement ideal, and turn 
 even its limits into liberties. And so cyclic destruction 
 and renovation belong to the very framework of positive 
 religions,^ confessions of the mingled faith and fear on 
 
 1 Brinton : Myths 0/ the Xew IVerld, p. 198. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 265 
 
 which these are strung. The Deluge-myth is moreover 
 too widely spread in various forms to be referred to any- 
 thing less universal than such a demand as is here de- 
 scribed.^ But historically the Hebrew story is evidently 
 of Chaldean origin, as its extreme resemblance to that of 
 Berosus and that of the Izdubar epic is sufficient to show.^ 
 The Xisuthrus of this very ancient legend is the Hasisadra 
 of the cuneiform epic, — as found and translated by George 
 Smith, and improved by later interpreters. The Izdubar 
 epic is far older than the Hebrew version, and even more 
 nearly identical with it than the account in Berosus,^ since 
 it explains the Deluge as a penalty for sin ; as does also 
 the Greek legend of Deucalion. The corresponding Hindu 
 legend, on the contrary, in which Manu is saved by the 
 fish as an incarnation only, has no hint of this. The Chi- 
 nese " Deluge of Yao " is no deluge at all, but a myth of 
 agricultural industry. The originality of the story of Hasi- 
 sadra is shown by the fact that it makes a part of a great 
 epopee, and that its whole setting, as well as spirit, is 
 Chaldean. It could never, by any possibility, have been 
 borrowed from the Genesis record. The points of resem- 
 blance are decisive ; those of difference few and trivial, 
 relating only to petty details. These differences, — such 
 as the size and form of the ark, the location of the moun- 
 tain, the smaller number of persons saved in the Hebrew 
 Deluge to re-people the earth, the translation of Hasisadra 
 like Enoch to heaven or some remote region, his voice 
 heard in the air bidding his companions take up the books 
 
 ^ What has been said of Lenormant's effort to show a wide-spread similarity in creation- 
 myths to justify his conclusion of a primeval revelation, is still more applicable to his collec- 
 tion of parallel Deluge-legends. The advocates of such a revelation have little or nothing to 
 stand upon, loudly as they have proclaimed the Noachic story. Behind the Babylonian epic 
 it is impossible to penetrate. This has been satisfactorily shown by the criticism of Hnlevy on 
 Lenormant's Les origiiies de civilization in the Revue Critique de V Hist, et Lit., Dec. 27, 
 1880. See also Revue de V Hist, des Religions, ii. i ; iii. 2. 
 
 ^ Cory: Ancient Fragments, p. 54 (extract from Syncellus). 
 
 ^ Given in Polyhistor and Arbydenus. 
 
266 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 of the law buried at Surippak and give them to the world, 
 — are part of the local coloring, and do not throw doubt 
 on the conclusion above stated. In no case is the indebt- 
 edness of the Hebrews more evident. The command to 
 build the ark, the threat to destroy mankind, the entry of 
 the animals, the opening of the windows and sending forth 
 of birds, the altar built on leaving the ark, the pleasant 
 savor of the offering to the senses of Jahveh, the promise 
 that the earth should not again be drowned, the covenant 
 and the blessing, — all show that the Hebrew copied from 
 this original. Not only is the ark coated with bitumen 
 in both legends, but precisely such gopher-wood structures 
 navigate the Euj)hrates to this day.^ 
 
 The origin of the ark-form of the Deluge-myth is 
 probably in the notion of an enclosed vital energy, which 
 breaks forth out of chaos to make or renew. World-egg, 
 vessel, chest, basket, various symbols of this envelopment 
 are conceived; and the mythology of Deliverance is trace- 
 able throughout antiquity by these varied forms of one 
 idea.^ The vital energy of the world or sun, in manifold 
 forms of struggle against the powers of darkness, or of 
 triumph over chaos or death, is ever represented. 
 
 Osiris, Adonis, Dionysus, Melkarth, are forms of what 
 the Egyptian funeral ritual invokes as " the Great One in 
 the chest," or ark. The sacred ship that bears gods or 
 heroes or divine men to world-mastery or redeeming work, 
 sails through every mythologic sea, and is borne in every 
 festal train. The egg breaks asunder, and life, order, deity 
 emerge by the law of birth out of death, which nought 
 escapes. The infant king of Assyria, and the babe who is 
 to deliver Israel, alike lie exposed in baskets among the 
 rushes of the river, and must be saved themselves before 
 they can save others. The arks of Sargon and of Moses 
 
 ' Loftus : Chaldiea and Srisiuna, p. 6g. 
 
 * See this well put in Brown's Great Dionysiak Bfyik, i. 196. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 267 
 
 are after all the same symbol as the mystic basket of the 
 Persian ritual and the Deluge-arks whence the world is 
 renewed. Finally, the old land of exile itself becomes the 
 world-egg, or sacred chest for a new Messiah, of whom it 
 was written, " out of Egypt have I called my Son." 
 
 The Hebrew relaters of the Flood differ from all others 
 in laying the scene of world-renewal in a region remote 
 from their own, thereby confessing their indebtedness to a 
 foreign source. They have, in addition, set the beginning 
 of the rain at the autumnal equinox, which time, in Chal- 
 dea, actually opens the rainy season.^ Undoubtedly the 
 Euphrates furnished the materials of the story by its in- 
 undations, which still cause the whole land to become 
 "pools; "^ and these materials were used in the later 
 Hebrew theological revival, as well as in the Chaldean 
 epos, to enforce the idea of chastisement by a personal 
 God for disobedience to his will. In the early time, all 
 the Nature-gods come in to help Hea, the god of waters, 
 bring on the storm ; and Bel, as deliverer, takes Hasisa- 
 dra by the hand. This fact alone would prove the Hebrew 
 version, as strictly monotheistic, to be the later. Never- 
 theless, Rawlinson as usual assumes that the Hebrews 
 have preserved the tradition of the Deluge in its prime- 
 val truth, while the Chaldean account adds these points 
 in which the two stories differ, " because not content with 
 the plain truth " ! 
 
 The Hebrew legend, though more monotheistic, is at 
 the same time more exclusive, arbitrary, and dogmatic in 
 
 * Lenormant : Le deluge et V epofiee Babylonlenne. 
 
 2 At this day "the waters which descend every year from the Armenian mountains are 
 sufficient to make several such rivers as the Euphrates, which breaks over its banks and cuts 
 new channels, and but for incessant canalling would keep the rich lands of Mesopotamia 
 under water every year. The peasants told Kadree Pasha that the overflow of the Euphrates 
 was in the hands of God. 'I am not going to look into that matter,' answered the 
 unbiblical Moslem official ; ' what concerns me is how you have spent the twelve thousand 
 pounds appointed by the government to regulate it.' " Geary's Journey through Asiatic 
 Turkeyi vol. i chap. xi. 1878. 
 
268 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 tone than the Chaldean. It carries the worship of per- 
 sonal Will to a more extreme form, centring in a jealous 
 Individual, whose whole dealing with man is by tests and 
 retributions. In no other way could the sovereignty of a 
 national God be displayed ; and so the later mythologies 
 explain the mysteries and burdens of life as penalties 
 of his inflicting. The first man and woman are made to 
 sin that the Creator may subject the one to the burden 
 of labor and the other to the pangs of childbirth and the 
 will of her husband.^ Next, all mankind sin, that the 
 Omnipotent Individual may doom all to death; He finds 
 Noah only worthy to be saved, in order that in this one 
 family the whole future of mankind may be concentred. 
 He is evidently laying down the (mythic) rule, according 
 to which all history should converge to a single people, 
 as alone fit to be chosen for his own. And so the whole 
 primeval history of man is shaped into a chain to bind 
 the human race into the service of the Hebrew and his 
 God. 
 
 The Chaldean story of the Deluge, on the other hand, 
 was simply an episode in an epic, based on natural phe- 
 nomena describing the work of Nature-gods, and had no 
 special motive beyond transporting a holy man to a remote 
 place of blessedness, where the hero of the epos may con- 
 sult him, far away along the Erythraean shores consecrated 
 by traditions of the primal ocean, of the first revelation of 
 social wisdom, the earliest schools, libraries, and priest- 
 hoods. There is no purpose of extolling the gods of As- 
 syria or Chaldea, nor of expounding the philosophy of 
 penalty, nor of accounting by personal inflictions for the 
 evils of life. These old materials of a common Semitic 
 fund the Hebrew revisers, under the new national impulse, 
 elaborated in the conscious interest of a God who from the 
 beginning chooses out one man to receive his favor, while 
 
 1 Genesis, iii. i6-ig. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 269 
 
 all the rest suffer the penalties of disobedience to his 
 sovereign will. No indication of the nature of this sin is 
 given, beyond the charge that men took wives at their 
 will. The assertion ascribed to Elohim, that every imagi- 
 nation of man's heart was evil continually, and that he 
 repented having made him, is evidently a late product 
 of dogmatic motive. No -early social epoch of civiliza- 
 tion could be guilty of so pessimistic a view of human 
 nature. It is devised for the purpose of setting off the 
 righteousness of Elohim, and justifying his choice of a 
 special people : his rage at his own work and his resolve 
 to destroy it are not less characteristic of autocratic will. 
 Noah (renewal) is interpreted to mean comfort : one man 
 only, a type of the chosen people, with his family, is saved 
 from the deluge of evil in the surrounding world. The 
 intense earnestness of this motive gives a simplicity to 
 the style, which renders it at once naive and sublime. 
 All description of Nature is wanting, because the motive 
 has no regard either for Nature or beauty as such. It is 
 absorbed in the absolutism of Divine Will. It culminates 
 in a commandment to be fruitful and multiply, and to avoid 
 eating flesh with the blood, or the shedding of blood, — tra- 
 ditional precepts, marking early transitional steps towards 
 civilization, — and in what is called the Noachic covenant, of 
 which the sign is the bow in the cloud. Of this exclusive- 
 ness the Chaldean story has not a trace. It lays no empha- 
 sis on Hasisadra being the only good man : his servants, 
 male and female, and " the sons of the people " are saved 
 with him. The gods do not act arbitrarily nor autocrati- 
 cally. Hea tenderly remonstrates with Bel, dissuading 
 him from severity towards men ; and the final propitiation, 
 answering to the promise to Noah in the rainbow, is in- 
 duced not as in his case by the sweet savor of a sacrifice, 
 but by the reasons, suggested through Hea, that a sweeping 
 penalty would be unjust, and by the sympathy of Ishtar, 
 
270 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 who with the other gods compassionates mankind with 
 covered lips,^" The only form in which the idea of a 
 Deluge appears in the Persian books, is the battle of 
 Tistrya to purify the great waters of Ahura from the 
 poison of Ahriman.- The rain falls for ten days and 
 nights, and the earth is covered to the height of a man, 
 and all evil creatures are drowned. A great wind sweeps 
 the waters into a great sea, which Ahura sends Tistrya to 
 free from the poison of Ahriman's dead ; and in the great 
 battle he is aided by mighty rains, which afterward serve 
 to fertilize the earth. This is evidently wholly discon- 
 nected from the penal deluge of the Semites, and forms 
 but a natural phase of the great War of Deliverance 
 which Mazdeism carried through all the elements and 
 forms of Nature. The waters are not penal ; they are 
 healing, the pure gift of Ahura, serving only to bless 
 mankind. They are invoked, in the Avesta legend, by 
 the serpent Dahaka, for aid in destroying men ; but in the 
 form of the spotless Ardvi-gura they refuse him the boon,^ 
 while she grants the prayer of Thraetona for aid to destroy 
 the serpent.'* " Come, O ye clouds, come ! Let the waters 
 spread, fall, and spread abroad ! Pour ten thousand waves, 
 — speak, O holy Zarathustra ! for the destruction of disease 
 and death, of the evils sent by evil powers ; for the destruc- 
 tion of all that injures men. Let the earth, plants, all 
 healing things, be renewed." ^ 
 
 V. The ethnographical study in the tenth chapter of 
 Genesis, purporting to be the descending line of Noah's 
 sons, is a carefully prepared record of the nations known 
 to the Hebrews of the exile, and of those only, — each 
 treated as a distinct person, instead of a mixed community. 
 It illustrates again how powerful was the Semitic impulse 
 
 1 Savce's Smith : TJie CJialdean Acccnint of Genesis, p. 2S7, et seq. 
 
 2 Bundehesh, vii. ^ Aban-Yaskt, 7. * Ibid., 8. 
 6 Vendidad, xxi. 3-14; Harlez. See also Vafita, Ixiv. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 271 
 
 to give a personal form to every object of thought. Of 
 linguistic relations there is really no more conception 
 than would be conveyed by the fact that the nations are 
 grouped according to their geographical position, as 
 Herder recognized long ago.^ Such a study was possible 
 only in a centre like Babylon. The Hebrews, in their 
 early tribal isolation, could not have conceived such a 
 synthesis. Haui simply means black tribes of the hot 
 south; and y<:r///'r/Z', whether signifying the "brilliant" or 
 the " far-spread," is really a term for the nations of the 
 West.^ Canaan is oddly enough placed among the Ham- 
 ites, though Canaanite and Hebrew were certainly of the 
 same ethnic origin, of which the writers were probably 
 unaware. The Philistines are wrongly traced to Egypt. 
 Elam was not Semitic, but Accadian. The reference to 
 Sidon proves a late origin.'^ 
 
 VI. This geographical character of the distribution, 
 which explains the ethnological errors, modifies the na- 
 tional interest of the myth ; * but such an interest becomes 
 very evident, not only in the treatment of the family of 
 Ham, but especially in the legend of the Tower of Babel. 
 A cuneiform tablet recently discovered speaks of a confu- 
 sion of counsels relating to a piece of tower-work, and of 
 its destruction by the anger of Anu.^ Berosus helps con- 
 firm the probability that this is the original story of the 
 Tower of Babel, by his own story that the gods in early 
 time, angry at men's efforts to scale the sky, overturned 
 their work by great winds, and caused confusion of speech, 
 which had before been one and the same.*^ But this, so 
 
 1 Herder : Ideen zur Geschichte der Metischheit. 
 
 ^ Goldziher's solar etymologies on these points are extremely unsatisfactory. 
 
 ^ Rawlinson {Origin of Nations) has an elaborate effort to show that nothing in the table 
 is disputed by science. But his argument is a palpable failure, full of hypotheses, and after 
 all finding a mere fraction of the designations historically verified. 
 
 * Von Bohlen ; Genesis, ii. 202. 
 
 5 Records of the Past (tr. by Boscawen), vii. 129. Smith : Tlie Cliaidean Account of 
 Genesis, Sayce, pp. 163-165. 
 
 ® Cory; Ancient Fragments (from Alexander Polyhistor), p. 75. 
 
272 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 far as it goes on the ethnology of Babel as " confusion," 
 must have come from the Hebrews; no Chaldean would 
 ever have supposed Babel to mean anything but the " gate 
 of God." Whatever may have been the earliest form of 
 the story, the anger of God at the pride of man which 
 sought to scale heaven is thoroughly Hebrew. The ha- 
 tred of the nomad for settled life, which constructed the 
 tale of Cain's fratricide, and ascribed to his descendants 
 the first cities, sciences, arts, and which perhaps moved 
 the ancestors of the Hebrews to go out from " Ur of the 
 Chaldees," was stimulated by the great gathering of races 
 at Babylon and their diversity of speech. These were an 
 offence to the nationality of the exiles. The unfinished 
 tower of Belus, the mighty ruin with its haunting legend 
 of offended powers, was taken as the sign of a becoming 
 jealousy in their own God ; the vitrified bricks around it 
 proved a fall by lightning, — and so the story reached its 
 present shape in the Jahvistic rcvisal of traditions after 
 the exile. Rawlinson again gives the Hebrew the credit 
 of preserving the original revelation, and the Chaldean the 
 discredit of having tampered with its interest for mankind 
 for the sake of enhancing certain " sacred books " of their 
 own, — a charge really applicable to the Hebrews, whose 
 interest in mankind is confined to bringing the whole 
 race under the power and wrath of their national deity. 
 Later still, the Christian writers Cyril, Eusebius, Syncellus, 
 and others, citing Berosus who says the gods overturned 
 the tower of Babel, falsified the text to make it correspond 
 with the Bible, substituting " God " for " the gods." ^ 
 
 In Bible apologetics of the kind we have given, Rawlin- 
 son simply follows the traditional method of the Christian 
 Church. The relation of the Hebrew myths to the ethnic 
 ones which they so much resemble, when not positively 
 inverted so as to make the latter the borrowers, is mis- 
 
 * Carrd : L'A^icien Orient, ii. 462. 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 273 
 
 represented as being the introduction of a wholly new and 
 higher spirit, universal and divine as the others are human 
 and special, and as revealing the one true God as distin- 
 guished from the false gods of the Asiatic races. But the 
 Hebrew introduced no such new foundation of authority, 
 no such new ground of certitude. What the Abrahamite 
 really demanded was that his God should have a more 
 human volition and selection, if possible, than other gods ; 
 that a covenant should be made with him as between two 
 men, promising a special care and the multiplication of 
 seed on the one side in return for obedience on the other. 
 After the exile had somewhat purified this personal rela- 
 tion by a consciousness of ethnic connection and depend- 
 ence ; after maturer thought had applied it to the solution 
 of social and moral problems ; after the prophetic spirit 
 had breathed upon it, — the same monotheistic separatism 
 and exclusive interest still remained firm, although obliged 
 to concede somewhat to these enlarging influences. The 
 national theocratic writer who worked up the old mythol- 
 ogy in its present form was mainly intent on bringing the 
 history of mankind into the line of Jahvistic providence 
 and guidance. Now the historic value of this step is sim- 
 ply that which belongs to the idea of personal Will as the 
 substance of God. This idea we have already stated to 
 be characteristic of all the religions of Iran. We have 
 here its culmination in a series of acts by which Jahveh 
 chooses a single people as his typical heirs and representa- 
 tives for the government of the world. It is this expansion 
 of the Iranian type of worship by the Hebrews that makes 
 their traditional mythology interesting in our present in- 
 quiry. As a stage in the progress of man to universal 
 religion, the Iranian conception is still predominant; and 
 the Hebrew phase of it is of immense historic importance. 
 But neither the Iranian conception, nor its Hebrew or 
 Semitic expansion, is for us the measure and test of uni- 
 
 iS 
 
274 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 versal truth. This mode of conceiving the substance of 
 the universe can no longer remain unquestioned, even in 
 its still more expanded form, as Christian theology. We 
 have seen that the Hindu mind tended to worship ab- 
 stract unity and super-personal being as more satisfactory 
 than any definite personal conception. In its pantheism a 
 conscious personal choice of human instruments, men, or 
 nations would be out of place. The Chinese, on the other 
 hand, have not separated deity from the concrete detail of 
 the universe ; and here again such a personal choice would 
 not be rational. Modern science has still other objections. 
 Science abolishes supernatural volitions acting from with- 
 out, and so tends to reject the idea of a personal Creator, 
 in the commonly received sense of the words. Universal 
 Religion, reaching to the inscrutableness of Infinite Being 
 as the substance of the cosmos itself, shrinks ever more 
 and more from ascribing personal motives, intentions, or 
 individual volitions to this Substance. The authority of 
 principles whose root is in realities behind all personal 
 wills, which must be based in them, not they in it, becomes 
 the foundation of absolute morality. The Semitic religions, 
 — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, — were enfolding sheaths 
 of anthropomorphic mythology, needed for a time to pro- 
 tect the growing sense of essential cosmic order, until that 
 which they instinctively groped after should come, as they 
 had come, successively, in their day. That Christianity 
 gave noble meaning to the doctrine of a divine Will, by 
 emphasizing the element of Fatherhood therein is true, 
 and hence its immense historic value ; but that did not and 
 could not destroy the essential character of sovereign Will 
 as arbitrary, finite, external. With all its tenderer, freer 
 materials, Christianity did not alter the Hebrew way of 
 conceiving God. Still less did the Jahvism of the post- 
 exilian Hebrews, though improving in some ways on the 
 old Chaldean mythology, substitute a new method. And 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 275 
 
 we can no longer set off the Hebrews from other more 
 Oriental branches of the Semitic fiamily, in respect of the- 
 istic beliefs, as a supremely chosen people, with gifts to 
 humanity of a wholly new and specially providential kind. 
 To abandon this error is the grand edict issued to relig- 
 ious thought from the new-risen tablets of Nineveh and 
 Babylon. 
 
 The result of these Genesis-studies may be briefly stated. 
 The religious mythology of the Hebrews, rooted primarily 
 in an old Chaldean and Semitic fund of legend, and the 
 national aspiration for an exclusive deity, were worked 
 over, under an influence which intensified the longing 
 for national independence by a bitter sense of loss, and 
 at the same time expanded their vision and gave it 
 philosophical and historic direction. This influence came 
 from Babylon, in the exile. Here was a concourse of 
 races which could not fail to inspire the idea of human- 
 ity as a whole. Here was a large historic, traditional, and 
 poetic literature, from which the Hebrew annalists and 
 psalmists drew much of their tone as well as material.^ 
 Here were legends of the origin of things, of divine pur- 
 poses, of penalties for sin, of physical and moral con- 
 ditions, and of national destiny. Here, as their whole 
 subsequent record shows, the tribes had opportunity to 
 learn spiritual discipline and the devoutness of resigna- 
 tion and trust, and to fit themselves for world-wide ser- 
 vice in the realm of religious culture. We may even say 
 that at Babylon began their literary sense as well as their 
 ecclesiastical organization. Here they dropped their He- 
 brew tongue and assumed the Aramaic, in the sixth cen- 
 tury before Christ. Here was adopted the astrological and 
 demonic imagery of the book of Daniel, so fertile for 
 their future apocalyptic writing. Here the spectacle of 
 the rise and fall of empires taught them a kind of ui^^ii- 
 
 ' Schrader (AUgeuteine Zeitun^, Augsburg, June 19, 1S74). t 
 
2/6 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 versality in theoretic scope, without disturbing that intense 
 self-consciousness which made them interpret all history 
 as centring in themselves. In the Chaldean exile origi- 
 nated that strange mixture of opposites which imposed 
 itself on the world as the one only true philosophy of 
 historic providence, and which has had its day in the 
 Christian method of constructing history around a chosen 
 people and a personal Messiah. Instead of finding the 
 evolution of human nature in history, this providential 
 Judaism saw simply an omnipotent personal Will work- 
 ing on mankind and shaping its destinies in the interest 
 of the Hebrew tribes; while the modern method, still the 
 orthodox one, as in Bossuet's day, differs from it only in 
 changing the objective point of the same set of events 
 and data, and so using them as to make the providential 
 Will act, not in their interest as tribes,- but in the interest 
 of a Hebrew-born human God, whose claims they declined 
 to accept. The theories of religious authority and divine 
 government which have predominated in Christendom 
 down to the present moment, the recognized foundations 
 of theology and solutions of life and the world, we repeat, 
 began to take shape and direction in the experience of 
 the Hebrew exiles by the rivers of Babylon, weeping when 
 they remembered Zion, their harps hung on the willows. 
 Accursed Babylon was the mother of Christianity. 
 
 These beliefs enter naturally into the history of human 
 development; they represent a maturing stage in the evo- 
 lution of religion considered as the worship of personal 
 Will. This is the key to their imperfections, their want 
 of universality, their rejection by science. This worship of 
 individual Will is the real substance of the exclusive and 
 jealous claims of the ancient Hebrews, — of their nomadic 
 hatred of other races settled in their habits and regulated 
 by laws. This explains their substitution of arbitrary 
 commandment for rational freedom ; their superstitions 
 
THE HEBREW AND THE CHALDEAN. 2// 
 
 concerning divine rewards and penalties ; their dread of 
 knowledge as a religious trespass ; their fear of the Gen- 
 tile as one under curse, or as ignorant of the conditions 
 of safety. 
 
 The Genesis-legends which grew out of these elements 
 are found to lack simplicity and spontaneity ; to be a mix- 
 ture of myth and dogma, and evident elaborations of early 
 and largely Chaldean materials for special apologetic pur- 
 poses, — such as justifying the institution of the Sabbath, 
 the right of man over woman, the exclusion of foreign 
 races from divine favor, the claim of Jahveh to do accord- 
 ing to his will. Even Lenormant admits in his elaborate 
 discussion of their origin, that the writers availed them- 
 selves of myths already prevalent in the nations around 
 them for dogmatic purposes, to represent more strongly 
 the violence of the iniquity of the world outside. But we 
 shall not explain their origin in human nature by merely 
 detecting their errors. Behind these are moral and spirit- 
 ual facts, which history has here, as elsewhere, been con- 
 structed to meet and illustrate, — the demand of the 
 religious nature of man for a solution of the problems 
 of his experience, for reconcilement to the conditions of 
 existence and the order of the universe ; the demand 
 of his nature for a philosophy of history, for a concen- 
 tration of motives on some central truth, for unitary 
 movement in human progress ; demands which from age 
 to age find new meanings, but always testify to the common 
 nature and aim of man. 
 
 More definitely, these antique gropings of imagination 
 and faith, with all their dross of hatred, desire, and fear, 
 are outgrowths of the conscience, — of the eternal dread 
 of penalty, natural and personal, when the soul is under 
 consciousness of evil doing ; of the ideal in man when he 
 reflects on the defect of promised good, conceived as 
 somewhat for which he was born, and whose loss is a fall 
 
2/8 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 from Paradise ; of the infection of evil in man and Nature, 
 giving the aspect of a poetic justice to deluges, fratricides, 
 and the shortening of human life ; and of the hardship of 
 toil, — sole inevitable condition of wisdom and success. 
 
 Realities like these, not mere word-changes nor solar 
 phenomena, are what construct myths, make Bibles, found 
 religions. In the crudities of their early history and 
 the persistent illusions of maturer ages, there is no more 
 powerful agent than the fears and hopes involved in the 
 worship of personal Will. 
 
 J 
 
POLITICAL FORCES. 
 I. 
 
 BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 
 
 " I ^HE foregoing section has given some idea of the 
 -*- complexity of those race-quaHties that were to be 
 gathered up by the Persian empire into a dynamic basis 
 for the civihzations of the West. All the nerve-fibres of 
 historic force were in fact converging into one massive 
 ganglionic centre, of whose coming energy that spray of 
 races dashed by the will of Xerxes over heroic Greece 
 gave but a feeble and transient sign. 
 
 The Babylonian Chaldeans called themselves the nation 
 of the Four Tongues ; and we have seen that they con- 
 tained Semitic, Turanian, and Cushite elements, probably 
 Aryan also. The " mixed multitude " that thronged the 
 streets of Babylon furnished food for the imagination of 
 Greek dramatists^ and Hebrew mythologists and prophets. 
 Even Egyptian features are visible through the dusky civi- 
 lization of the Euphrates valley. The cuneiform records 
 of Assyrian conquests astonish us by the immense number 
 and variety of tribes that had reached distinct names and 
 fames at so early a period, and were swept into subjection 
 to a common master. Nineveh was substantially Semitic 
 in her religious and sensuous intensity, in her passion for 
 the universal sway of her national gods, and in her concen- 
 trated worship of personal Will. Then came the semi- 
 Aryan Mede, — not Aryan, for the Medes were largely 
 Turanian, the very name of their country being a proof of 
 it; and the Aryans were but a dominant class, — one of six 
 classes, as Herodotus tells us. Oppert even considers the 
 
 ' Aeschylus : Persce. 
 
282 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 great Median kings, whose history he records, beginning 
 with Deioces, the founder of the State, as of the Turanian 
 race. A hardy mountain people, for two centuries sub- 
 ject to Assyria, bursts in on the overgrown giant, spread 
 out, inert and loose, and, after hurling aside with barbaric 
 treachery hordes of purely destructive Scythian intruders, 
 shapes the elements into that first great international bond 
 of fellowship in human history, — the League of Lydia, 
 Media, and Babylonia, 6io B. C. 
 
 This Median empire was but a flash of nerve-lightning. 
 It lasted less than a century ; but when it had passed by, 
 the nations were found possessed, like iron-filings beneath 
 a magnet, by a stupendous force of coalescence. The full 
 organization of these materials, which Semitic Assyria bent 
 on conquest only could not begin to effect, even semi-Aryan 
 Media had to transmit to a mightier hand. The function 
 of the Mede was, with a Turanic //c?;/, to break up the 
 fixed soil, and to open channels for a more creative fire. 
 This was not difficult, for the confluence of nations was 
 but mechanical, and without organic relations. Herodotus 
 tells us that Nineveh fell, not from internal strife nor de- 
 cay, but by the revolt and desertion of her allies ; and the 
 cuneiform tablets record one incessant struggle to hold 
 together an empire always crumbling at every point. 
 Cyaxares the Mede, we are told, was the first really to 
 organize an Asiatic army, combining the confused hordes 
 which mere conquest brought together. He was a great 
 personality, and Median history centres in him. But the 
 main function of the Mede was to introduce the Persian, 
 first absorbing the little kingdom of Achaemenes, then in 
 turn being absorbed by his descendant, the great Cyrus. 
 He must decrease, that the returning Achaemenide might 
 increase. He came and went, leaving no trace. The 
 wooden pillars of his palaces speedily perished ; ^ his 
 
 ' Rawlinson : Ancietit Monarchies, \\. ^i^^-2^^■ 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 283 
 
 sculptures disappeared, and but one broken lion remains 
 to tell their story ; ^ his towns were few and unwalled ; 
 he left no literature, no record of his origin, no permanent 
 institutions. His principal record is in a few monumental 
 carvings and scattered notices by writers of other countries. 
 These indeed retain some shadowy image of the fleeting 
 I world-master, like the filmy outlines of primeval sea-rovers, 
 which we sometimes find tenderly spared by Nature through 
 her metamorphosis of rocks. Recent researches, too, seem 
 to indicate that the Magi of Herodotus, whom it is no 
 longer possible to identify with the Mazdean fire-priest 
 (^Athrava), represented the old religion of the Turanian 
 Medes, especially its demonology, in many respects an- 
 tagonistic to the Persian faith, which the conspiracy of 
 Gomatcs, the pseudo-Smerdis, under lead of these Magi, 
 succeeded for a time in striking down. 
 
 The Medes, it must also be observed, maintained their 
 language, in spite of Aryan dominion, through the reigns 
 of the greatest Achsemenidan kings ; and Darius held it in 
 such honor as to give it precedence of the Assyrian, in the 
 great trilingual inscription in which he recounted his ex- 
 ploits to his subject States. These are signs of an energetic 
 national life, however brief its glory, and make plausible 
 enough the features which we may gather from Greek 
 history to construct their portrait. Tall, handsome, grace- 
 ful, merciless, and brave, the compact troop of " horse- 
 archers " swept down from their mountains, to pierce the 
 Ninevite armor with their long spears, and open ways for 
 a more vigorous life. There is a fine ease of movement in 
 these irresistible cavaliers, who touch their appointed hand- 
 work with the free grace of their own fluted caps, or of the 
 pillared arcades which they introduced into Oriental art, — 
 a large genial handling, typified in their taking the colors 
 sacred to the five planets and the sun and moon to make 
 
 ^ Rawlinson : Ancient Mottarchies, ii. 321. 
 
284 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 a rainbow of their city walls ; a firmness of grasp which 
 has become proverbial as a synonym for inexorable laws, 
 and a consciousness of authority that well fitted them to 
 be heralds of the centralizing power of personal Will, — 
 as appears in what Herodotus and Strabo tell us of their 
 haughty kings, who were not to be approached even by 
 prostration, and who withdrew at their pleasure into des- 
 potic seraglios where eunuchs kept guard. 
 
 The religious motor of modern civilizations has been the 
 worship of personality. It is natural to find their springs 
 in that succession of Asiatic empires, each of which was 
 the sudden triumph of some petty tribe, forcing its way to 
 power over the mass by its individual compactness and 
 unity, and by the inspiration of a definite aim. The course 
 of the present chapter will amply illustrate this law oi 
 history. 
 
 Even Babylon revives from her subjection to Assyria at 
 the touch of the Mede, and for a little while wields a sway 
 wider than either over the ferment of nations. Again the 
 pregnant atom of personal purpose rules the chaos of ten- 
 dencies : the smallest of States holds the mass by its 
 magnetic force. But, unlike the Mede, the Babylonian 
 embodied in himself the whole substance of these eth- 
 nic elements in their finest forms, — as history, tradition, 
 institution, accumulated mental resource. 
 
 His rise to supremacy, therefore, as we have already 
 said, shows the scope of that prophetic construction which 
 was going on in the Iranian world. The Babylonian 
 kings, all gathered up at last into one speech, one apparel, 
 one record of arrow-head syllables, are of many races. 
 Berosus tells of Arabian, Chaldean, Median, Semite dynas- 
 ties. Many of their names are still linguistic riddles, and 
 some (such as Hammurabi) point to races now unknown. 
 They had found room in their pantheon for all the older 
 gods, every one the ideal of some tribe of riien. It is no 
 
 ^ 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 285 
 
 longer an adventurous troop of warriors taking in hand a 
 decaying empire, but a vast historic result, gathering into 
 imperial personality the arts and sciences of a thousand 
 years of growth, and the product of interfused races and 
 religions, temples and priesthoods, on an unexampled scale, 
 and in possession of a literature that summed up the wis- 
 dom of the race, — an industrial achievement surpassing all 
 that Asia had known ; a passion for national construction far 
 beyond the Assyrian, and culminating in Nebuchadnezzar's 
 reconstruction of every historical monument, city, or great 
 canal in the Babylonian land ; its metropolis with the full 
 dimensions of a State, with an area of two hundred square 
 miles, condensing the commerce, wealth, and religion of a 
 hemisphere. Babylon, " hammer of the nations," forcing 
 their tributes before her feet, and their hordes into her 
 legions, was infinitely more; she was mother of arts to the 
 teachers of Phidias and Apelles, the builders of Athens 
 and Italy. She guaranteed that not one gift or tendency 
 in them all should be lost, not one acquisition of humanity 
 fail of circulating through coming time. Babylon, " key 
 of history,", was the prophecy of unity, of culture, of uni- 
 versal religion, Nebuchadnezzar, in the Hebrew legend 
 cast down among the beasts for his pride, was not proud 
 enough to boast, or even to know, the grandeur of his 
 function among men. 
 
 Observe again what it is that controls the elements to 
 ends beyond itself or them. Personal will has here almost 
 reached its absolute form, so far as the monarch's power 
 Is concerned. Another master is yet to come, with 
 greater genius for sway, because it is the genius of a 
 whole tribe concentrating its forces in one man. Baby- 
 lonian autocracy rests on religion ; Persian, on self- 
 conscious gift and positive culture. Nebuchadnezzar is 
 Merodach ; Nabonidus is Bel. Every royal name is here 
 a compound of gods and the dealings of gods with men. 
 
286 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Even the rage that tore and the heel that crushed the 
 nations were but conditions of this personal sway, by 
 which direction was given to the thought and faith of 
 coming ages ; and in the succeeding European civiliza- 
 tions, whose central force has been always some factor in 
 the worship of will-power, have not these Babylonian con- 
 ditions of such worship, in one or another form, maintained 
 their ground? 
 
 In spite of that remorseless indictment by the Hebrew 
 prophets, echoed by the Christian seer, which have made 
 this queen of Western Asia a hissing on the lips of ages, 
 the strongest unconscious testimony to the significance of 
 her work comes from these enemies themselves. On the 
 one hand, the prophets have nothing to charge against her 
 of which they do not confess that their own people were 
 guilty to the full extent of their power. The pseudo- 
 Jeremiah's^ picture of Babylon's licentiousness and idolatry 
 is surpassed by Ezekiel's description of the abominations 
 of Jerusalem of that day,^ and pales before the mournful 
 confessions of the later Isaiah in the name of his rescued 
 nation. Nevertheless, the Hebrew asserted the unaltered 
 claim of these desperate rebels to be the children of Jah- 
 veh's mercies and the future crown of his rejoicing,^ while 
 Babylon had forfeited the right to live. On the other hand, 
 Jeremiah, noblest of the prophets, who dared to speak his 
 mind in face of princes and priests on the meaning of public 
 events, who, undismayed by foul dungeon or patriotic rage, 
 denounced the great national crime of re-enslaving free- 
 men, and launched Jahveh's thunders at the head of a cruel 
 and treacherous king, and who outlived the charge of trea- 
 sonable sympathy with the foreigner, to find his insight 
 justified by the course of events, — this one statesman 
 
 ' The denunciation of Babylon (chaps. ]., li.) at the close of his prophecies belongs to a 
 period after his death, and is manifestly the work of a later hand. 
 
 - Ezekiel, viii. xvi. xxii. 3 ibid., xx. 33-44. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 28/ 
 
 among the prophets has nothing but welcome and honor 
 for the Chaldean city, as Jahveh's avenger and the ap- 
 pointed refuge of his people. 
 
 Not till the tread of the Persian marching to Babylon's 
 destruction broke on the Hebrew ear, was Jeremiah's name 
 used by another to pull down the honorable prestige he 
 had built up for her ; not till then do we hear of the 
 "golden cup" that has made the nations drunk and mad, 
 whose end is come, and the measure of whose covetous- 
 ness is full, inhabited only by hyenas and owls. It was 
 the Hebrew's way to construct events when they had 
 passed into fulfilment as inspired predictions of his own 
 absolutism. 
 
 But none other than the prophet himself whose lips were 
 glowing with the grandest gospel of political and religious 
 liberty that stands between the lids of the Bible, — " After 
 those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward 
 parts, and write it in their hearts, and they shall teach no 
 more every man his neighbor, saying, ' Know the Lord,' 
 for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the 
 greatest of them," ^ — none other than he it was who said 
 to foolish kings, in the same great Name, Behold, I have 
 given all these lands into the hand of the king of Bab}-lon, 
 my seri^ant, and the nation that will not serve him will I 
 punish with the sword. Hearken not to lying prophets, 
 but serve the king of Babylon and live.^ And to the cap- 
 tives from Jerusalem, " Seek ye the peace of the city 
 whither I have caused you to be carried, . . . and pray 
 unto the Lord for it ; for in the peace thereof shall ye have 
 peace." ^ " Jahveh's sword is in his hand," says Ezekiel, 
 too, of the Chaldean, " and Pharaoh's arm shall be 
 broken." ^ 
 
 ' Jeremiah, xxxi. 33, 34. ^ Ibid., xxvii. ° Ibid., xxix. 
 
 * Ezekiel, xxx. In the Talmud the Jewish Rabbins ascribe the destruction of Jerusalem to 
 the neglect of popular education and the decay of schools (Schaff, 119) ; also to the stern literal- 
 ism with which the law was executed, to the neglect of its milder spirit. ( B. Meziah, 306.) 
 
288 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 And what, after all, was the special ofifence of a people 
 from whom Jahveh was bringing deliverance to the de- 
 based tribes, and from whom was to come their full 
 fruition? " Because ye rejoiced and exulted, O ye plun- 
 derers of my inheritance, because ye wantoned like a 
 thrashing heifer and neighed like a stallion, your mother 
 is utterly confounded ; she that bore you is put to shame." 
 " Because she hath exalted herself against Jahveh, . , . 
 therefore shall her young men fall in her streets, and 
 nothing of her be left;" because also the years of cap- 
 tivity had gone on, as Jeremiah had predicted they would, 
 and still " the oppressor" refused to let " his people" go.^ 
 In short, it was because the national God of the Hebrews 
 was ignored and set aside, that their religious zeal dared 
 to put upon the dead lips of Jeremiah himself those in- 
 vented directions to his disciple, to cast his " book of 
 the woes of Babylon " into the Euphrates, bound to a 
 stone, saying, " Even so shall Babylon sink and rise no 
 more. ^ 
 
 And yet it is from their own admissions that we learn 
 to ascribe to this "oppressor" a treatment singularly gen- 
 erous and kind. The later romance of Daniel gives evi- 
 dence at least that the Babylonians exercised a hospitality, 
 religious and intellectual, unequalled in any other State ; 
 that their sovereign was accustomed to seek out unblem- 
 ished men from foreign lands, skilled in all outside wisdom 
 and science, so that the learning of the Chaldeans might 
 be sown in choice soil for public service ; ^ and that he 
 had the insight to discern in a Hebrew youth abilities be- 
 yond all his astrologers and magicians, and liberality to 
 reward him with the highest official station.* If this na- 
 tive culture is denounced as sorcery, let us not forget that 
 Daniel himself was but another among the king's inter- 
 
 1 Jeremiah, 1. ^ ibid., li. 
 
 3 Daniel, i. 4. ^ Ibid., ii. 48 ; vi. 3. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 289 
 
 pretcrs of dreams. In the same way it accorded with 
 later Hebrew associations to represent Nebuchadnezzar 
 and Cyrus, — the Pharaoh and the Messiah of the national 
 exile, — as alike converted to the worship of Jahveh, and 
 to sound their praises in the language of the national 
 psalms.^ Surely there was more justice in this acknowl- 
 edgment than in the bitter complaints of oppression that 
 broke out from the exiles, when they heard the advancing 
 tramp of the Persian host, — " Woe to the spoiler, who 
 showed no mercy, proud against the Holy One of Israel ! 
 She shall be snared and taken, so that none shall escape; 
 she shall be dealt with according to her works." ^ Nor can 
 we help accounting for the later Isaiah's tender wail over 
 Israel in exile, " as a man of sorrows, acquainted with 
 grief," by the long-pent feeling of national thraldom, rather 
 than by any special severities on the part of the master. 
 But this indignation found freer vent in the later Hebrew 
 legend, where Babylon figures, to meet the exigencies of 
 an anti-Syrian passion, as a nest of cruelties and idolatries, 
 a fiery furnace for the martyrs of Israel's God, a haunt of 
 lying priests, who befool king and people till Daniel out- 
 wits them ; the throne of a dragon-god, till the same 
 prophet chokes him with a bolus to prove him mortal ; a 
 den of lions for a prophet, who is fed by one brought 
 from Judea by the hair of his head, till the tyrant, who 
 is no other than Cyrus himself, is forced to confess the 
 Hebrew God.^ 
 
 It is easy to understand that religious exclusiveness 
 should combine in this way with patriotic wrath, especial- 
 ly when we remember the despondency of the Jews after 
 the exile, at Jahveh's failure to bring the promised Messi- 
 anic age. But Babylon was not the persecutor of nations 
 and faiths ; it was their gathering-place, and the germinal 
 
 ' Ezr.\ i 2-4 2 Jeremiah, 1. 29. 
 
 * See Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament. 
 19 
 
290 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 point of their unity. As Jeremiah had counselled the 
 exiles to pray for the peace of Babylon, so Ezekiel's con- 
 ferences with their elders show that they were allowed to 
 retain their civil and religious institutions, governed by a 
 chief of their own, although by his own testimony they 
 were altogether unworthy of the privilege.^ The exiles 
 were not only protected in life and property, they were 
 represented at court. Nehemiah was royal cup-bearer. 
 Jehoiachin, their imprisoned prince, was released and 
 treated with distinguished honor.^ They increased in 
 numbers, and while three times as many persons were 
 ready to return, upon the permission of Cyrus, as had 
 been carried away two generations before, the large and 
 influential number of those who stayed in Babylonia, not- 
 withstanding the exertions of Ezra and his friendly coad- 
 jutors in literary and legislative activity, is a proof of the 
 strong root that had been struck in the peace and pros- 
 perity of their Chaldean home. Nor could the patriots 
 fairly complain of the manner in which the interests of 
 their country were looked after by the conquerors. Geda- 
 liah was doubtless the best governor who could have been 
 appointed for Judea, and his foul murder by his own coun- 
 trymen was anything but encouraging to royal benefac- 
 tions. The free choice of Zerubbabel and Jeshua as 
 leaders of the return was no better sign of the friend- 
 ship of Cyrus than of the normal condition of Hebrew 
 institutions in the land of exile. How prodigious the con- 
 trast with their utter degradation and the ruin of the Pales- 
 tinian remnant and the fugitives in Egypt, a glance at the 
 record shows. Never did a people exhibit less political 
 capacity under difficult relations with their stronger neigh- 
 bors than did these children of an exclusive religious zeal 
 upon their own soil. Nothing but the crash that flung 
 their quivering fragments into the fostering arms of a 
 
 ■ Ezekiel, xx. 33-38; xxiii. - Jeremiah, lii. 31. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 29 1 
 
 hated foreign civilization like the Persian, highly regulated 
 and organized, whose very success stimulated them with 
 mingled mortification and hope, saved those germs of 
 future influence upon human history that lay hidden in 
 their very self-isolation. The secret of their tragic destiny 
 is revealed in that seething of undisciplined passions which 
 mingled in one volcanic outbreak against Babylon the ten- 
 der^st pathos of homesick exiles and the merciless rage of 
 savages. " By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down ; 
 yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. O daughter of 
 Babylon ! happy shall he be who dasheth thy little ones 
 against the stones."-' 
 
 When the returning exiles have come under Ezra's 
 Law in their own land they are a new people ; properly 
 for the first time a people ; possessed by a conviction of 
 national and religious unity, due in no slight measure to 
 the stimulus of the exile and return. Jahveh is now the 
 centre of the one national ritual. Israel, the servant of 
 God, suffers for the popular sins, redeemer of the world. 
 How they put away their very wives and children in the 
 name of national duty ! A more or less permanent written 
 constitution has been accepted, whose main peculiarity is 
 a compromise between the two elements until then exist- 
 ing in sharp antagonism, — the prophetic and the priestly. 
 Both are in fact transformed ; and while the ecclesiastical 
 system becomes far more hierarchical and vicarious in 
 form, the prophetic has lost its individual inspiration, is 
 recognized as having no more the old fire which had glori- 
 fied the days of tribal discord, but is diffused more widely 
 in the popular mind in a spirit of reaction against the 
 exclusivcness and pride of the second Temple, and in an 
 increase of religious and national enthusiasm fostered by 
 the instructions of the scribes. The Temple of Jerusalem 
 is now, as vainly proposed by Josiah, the only place of 
 
 * Psalm, cxxxvii. 
 
292 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Jahveh's presence ; the law is a systematic ritual ; the old 
 Levitical rights to priesthood are suppressed as punishment 
 for the national sin of free worship on the high places, 
 while the sons of Aaron are exalted into an exclusive hie- 
 rarchy, a high-priest of mediatorial dignity at their head,^ 
 splendid in dress as in function, with sacrifices, vows, festi- 
 vals reorganized in their interest.^ The sorrows of the 
 exile have intensified religious nationality, or, we may say, 
 created it in the form of an aristocracy. Yet, on the other 
 hand, this very official and aristocratic spirit compelled a 
 certain democratic quality, a free many-sidedness, in which 
 lay the germs of the Maccabcan heroes, of Hillel and Jesus, 
 of Essenic sainthood, of the moral and philosophical sub- 
 limities scattered through the ecclesiasticism of the Apoc- 
 rypha, of the free doubts and varying dogmatic questioning 
 of the " Preacher " and the Son of Sirach, of the lawless 
 treatment of historic facts and laws by the Chronicler, of 
 the stimulating strife of factions in Asmonean times, of the 
 growth of sects and of those Greek sympathies of Hero- 
 dian times which did so much to counteract the legalism 
 of the church, and, especially, of the efforts to escape an- 
 thropomorphic views of deity, which appear both in Judea 
 and Alexandria. The epoch bore the noblest poetry in 
 the psalms of the Temple, full of popular love and longing 
 for its holiness ; while the Persian satrap and the remote- 
 ness of the Temple of Jahveh's presence, aided by the 
 synagogues spread over the land, could not but combine 
 to foster local independence and protest. 
 
 Moreover the Law itself, in its reformations, brought with 
 it a sense of national remorse which made it provide for 
 many wants and claims of the masses. Contrast Nehe- 
 miah's Sabbatarian bigotry and his rage against mixed 
 marriages with his rebukes of ricli, usurers and his release 
 of poor debtors fron; their hands. Note the limitations 
 
 1 Zechariah, vi. 9-15. - Kuenen : Religion 0/ Israel, ii. 259. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 293 
 
 set in the post-exilian law to the blood-avenger's rights 
 and powers,^ and the scheme for a Sabbatical jybilee-year 
 of release from debts and alienations of land, with the many- 
 laws facilitating redemption.^ These humanities stand in 
 relief against the many barbarous injunctions inspired by 
 the fear of heathen interference with the separation of the 
 holy nation to Jahveh.^ When we read the grand humani- 
 ties of Malachi and the later Isaiah, who wrote upon the 
 eve of the great national metamorphosis, we cannot help 
 thinking that these last and grandest utterances of the 
 prophetic spirit point not only backward to the expand- 
 ing and softening influences of the exile, but forward to 
 those noble landmarks of universality, — the books of Jo- 
 nah and of Ruth. Between these stands the whole distinc- 
 tive Levitical legislation into which Hebrew tradition and 
 life, from the old free tribal usages'^ through the Deuter- 
 onomic reformation, crystallized at last, as ecclesiasticism 
 does crystallize, — traced by the keen analysis of recent 
 scholarship to the labors of the Babylonian Jews of the 
 exile, beginning with Ezekiel, but mainly after the first 
 emigration of Zerubbabel and Jeshua, during the eighty 
 years between 538 and 458 B. C, and even later, at Jerusa- 
 lem itself. Here, as well as previously at Babylon, Ezra and 
 his companions were compiling, constructing, collating his 
 Book of Laws ^ for the use of the new people of Jahveh, for 
 whom these scribes saw in a regulated priestly ritualism 
 the nationality required.*^ They did their best to join 
 these to the old, forgotten, and the recognized statutes 
 and usages of the land ; but they did not scruple to alter 
 and add to these very largely, always in the interest of 
 ecclesiastical centralization and authority." For them the 
 
 1 Numbers, xxxv. 9-34. * Leviticus, xxv. 1-7. 
 
 ' See Numbers, xxxi. 49. * Exodus, xxi.-xxiii. 
 
 6 Levitical Book of Origins (Ewald). 6 gee Kuenen, ii. 152, 153, 233. 
 
 ' So the author of Chronicles, who seeks to give Davidic authority to their later ecclesi- 
 astical laws. 
 
294 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 great age of the prophets was dead and gone. It had 
 not united Israel, nor saved her. The age of written law 
 must come ; of the hedges of the scribe about it, and the 
 right of the priest to administer it. Yet see what lessons 
 the rude Hebrews must have learned at Babylon, what 
 breadth even in hating and repelling what was too great 
 for them to ignore ; and how the Persian universalism 
 followed them up in the edict commanding Ezra " to in- 
 struct all the people in the laws of their God." ^ Of the 
 influence of Zoroastrianism itself in the hundred years of 
 Persian sway over Judea we shall speak elsewhere ; Baby- 
 lonia is our present subject. 
 
 These Hebrews have learned the arts, traditions, litera- 
 ture of an ancient and great civilization. Their priests 
 and prophets have been working out, amid these large 
 resources, a reconstruction of their nomadic mythology, 
 a systematic religious code and ritual which shall recon- 
 cile the differences of their past and present, of their 
 formal and spiritual elements, and bind in one meaning 
 the Elohim of their fathers and the Jahveh of their faith. 
 Nothing is more manifest in their post-exilian literature, 
 unreliable as it is, than the purpose to give unity to their 
 history by making these two names of deity, which rep- 
 resent distinct stages in the growth of the religious idea, 
 completely interchangeable. And this they did so suc- 
 cessfully, that the words probably conveyed no more 
 suggestion of difference than we find in the terms " God " 
 and " the Lord," by which they are respectively rendered in 
 the English Bible. They were even joined in a single title, 
 Jahveh-EldJnm, the " Lord God." There can be no surer 
 sign of cosmopolitan experience in a people than the 
 effort to give unity to their rdigious history. To gather 
 up all its germinal stages into an ideal purpose, is a step 
 which involves previous intercourse with larger forms of 
 
 ' Ezra, vii. 25. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 295 
 
 civilization. And this result of the captivity was the 
 opening for constructions of universal history, like those 
 in Daniel and the Apocryphal books, as well as in the 
 ethnic genealogical tabic of Genesis ; ^ all of which, how- 
 ever marred by national and ecclesiastical exclusiveness, at 
 least indicates that this was giving way to a supreme inter- 
 est in human history as a whole. For this pregnant edu- 
 cation of Judaism, Christianity, its offspring, should credit 
 the much-abused banks of " the river of Chebar." We 
 may maintain that the age of prophecy was dead ; but 
 after all, till the day of the exile the Hebrew prophet was, 
 with all his moral ardor and protest, truculent, narrow, and 
 extravagant, extremely wild and irrational. There, as the 
 exile sat and mused, were opened larger heavens than 
 those of Ezekiel's vision or Ezra's priestly ritualizing. 
 The whole future of his people shaped itself then among 
 the heathen laws and hospitable liberties he held accursed. 
 No one could condense the evidences of this stimulating 
 influence better than Dean Stanley has done in one sen- 
 tence in his " History of the Jewish Church," — "The cap- 
 tivity bore the greatest of Hebrew prophets, the chief of 
 Hebrew scribes, the founder of Hebrew law, the fathers 
 of Hebrew literature." Ezekiel is possessed with the pic- 
 ture of Israel's history. His lamentations over this, and 
 his tracing out through all, of Jahveh's justice, is the earli- 
 est great construction of national history on moral and 
 religious principles, — of a Divine administration of affairs, 
 and of the supreme authority of a personal Will. The in- 
 terpretation of the Law by the best collected mind of the 
 nation was substituted for the dogmatism of the prophet ; 
 the constitution of the theocracy for the arbitrariness of 
 kings and priests. 
 
 But a greater social and political renewal than any of 
 these must be noted. There in prevailing Parsi customs,^ 
 
 1 Genesis, chap. x. 2 Kueiien : Religion of Israel, iii. 35. 
 
296 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 we may add, began the democratic element in Hebrew 
 religious forms, — the recognition of the human element 
 in the law for the instruction of the people, the Sabbath 
 meeting in the synagogue, the expansive legal studies of 
 the Scribes and growth of the oral law, the public assem- 
 blies called to reconstitute nationality,^ and the reshaping 
 of the old prophecies and histories. So also began there 
 the devout listening to the history of Jahveh's dealing 
 with their fathers,^ the public reading of the Law, and the 
 freer interpretation of the Scriptures that bore such a 
 leading part in the origins of Christianity when the Scribes 
 had overcome the priestly power, degenerating indeed into 
 the narrowness of the later Palestinian sects, but holding 
 its own in that larger survey of principles which distin- 
 guished Babylonian from Judean Talmudists, and which 
 afterward suffered from Judean narrowness as did early 
 Christianity.^ 
 
 To Babylon, then, the Hebrews owed their later language, 
 calendar, and religious imagery ; but, above all, an expansion 
 of mind, a historic sense ; germs of universality, hopes of 
 national life, an emotional experience of sorrow and faith 
 that was no less than a change of heart, and which flowed 
 forth in psalms of resignation and aspiration, of humble trust 
 and spiritual yearning, of noble purpose and happy praise. 
 Here the nation saw, through its old and now established 
 rite of slaughtered rams, even by reaction against this 
 ritualism to the nobler meanings of sacrifice, in the heroic 
 sainthood that suffered for the sake of all, the pious ser- 
 vant of God, the true Israel of exile, who was bruised for 
 the iniquities of his people, and by whose stripes they 
 were healed. Here in the hospitable shadow of a great 
 empire they grew into that home-trust which could after- 
 
 1 Neliemiah, viii. 10; Ezra, ix. 6-15. 
 "^ Nehemiah, ix. s- 
 
 ' Geiger : Das Judenthian u>id seine Geschichte, ii. 31, 32. Miihlfelder : Rabh, ein 
 Lebensbild zur Gesch. d, Talmud 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 297 
 
 wards say, " He who emigrates from Babylon to Jerusalem 
 commits a crime, breaks a command." ^ Here had indeed 
 been, and here was again to be, when eight or ten cen- 
 turies had passed, in the great age of Talmudic teaching, 
 and under many of the Persian Sassanidse, through the 
 Christian persecutions of Constantine and Justinian, a Har- 
 bor of Refuge, such as Judaism could not find elsewhere 
 in the civilized world. That the Jews themselves were in 
 some degree conscious of their debt of gratitude, for a 
 time at least, appears from the refusal of the high-priest 
 to transfer the national loyalty from Darius to Alexander 
 after his great victories over the Persian king.^ 
 
 It has been too long the fashion to see this great his- 
 toric city in the lurid light of Hebrew denunciations, and 
 to regard its destruction as evidence at once of prophetic 
 inspiration and of the wrath of the God of the Bible 
 against national iniquity. The absorption or passing away 
 of States is not a penalty for their sins, any more than their 
 expansion is the reward of their virtues. Without dispar- 
 aging the part played by moral forces in the movement 
 of civilization, we must regard historical conditions as 
 quite too complicated to be reduced to a mere formula 
 of ethical retribution. A Hebrew who ascribed the over- 
 throw of Jerusalem to the corruption of Jahveh-worship, 
 might as well have pretended that the extension of Neb- 
 uchadnezzar's sway was due to the virtues of his people ; 
 and he would then have had, in consistency, to demon- 
 strate that these same virtuous Babylonians- had been 
 transformed in half a century into criminals fit only for 
 the destroyer ! This logical continuity was wanting to 
 the Hebrew mind, which ascribed the success or failure 
 of the chosen nation to the terms on which they stood 
 with their God, while it failed to accord the same condi- 
 
 1 Jost : Gesch. d. Jitdent., iv. 305. Also Milman's History "f tlie Jews, chap. xxL 
 
 2 Josephus : Antiquities of the yews,xi. g, § 3. 
 
298 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 tions to the heathenism that lay outside of his law. The 
 simple fact was that the petty tribe of Judah could not 
 resist the conquerors of the world. Science has taught 
 us that the limits of a nation's existence and growth are 
 determined by conditions of climate, position, and race; 
 by its relative strength and sagacity; by the currents of 
 civilization, opening or closing paths to power; and by 
 the fortunes of war. Probably no great people was ever 
 so utterly demoralized as to owe its destruction to war 
 alone. The Roman Empire was enervated by self-indul- 
 gence. But its conquerors from the northern ivildernesses 
 were not models of virtue ; and the Rome that could not 
 withstand their blows could at least live an after-life in the 
 conquest of their brutality by her culture and her law. 
 Surely it was not owing to the vices of Rome that horde 
 after horde of barbarians pressed like waves on one another 
 till they overflowed Europe with a physical force that no 
 moral energy could have withstood. The consequences 
 of slavery were certainly sapping the unity of the empire ; 
 but so overgrown a dominion must have fallen to pieces 
 by lack of central authority, and by the restlessness of the 
 tribes it sought to hold, even if its provincial administra- 
 tion had been far better than it was. Like all great cities, 
 Babylon doubtless had her share of luxury, covetousness, 
 and crime j perhaps the pictures drawn by Hebrew prophet 
 and Latin historian are within the truth ; but to say that 
 for this reason her glory was turned to " heaps " is to 
 forget all the elements of the situation save one. It is 
 to ignore the immeasurable part she has borne in human 
 history, both before and after her visible downfall. It must 
 be remembered that her vices did not prevent her from 
 being, at that very moment, famous throughout Asia for 
 the valor and energy of her campaigns ; that a less skilful 
 and fortunate foe than Cyrus would probably have failed 
 to force her enormous defences, which were only carried 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 299 
 
 by a stratagem played on the effeminacy not of the peo- 
 ple, but of the court. With all their excesses, the Baby- 
 lonians had won repute for honesty and self-possession ; ^ 
 and the earnestness of their religious faith and public spirit 
 is shown by their prodigious works and by the inscriptions 
 of their kings. That a city which held from an unknown 
 antiquity down to the last moment of its existence the 
 rank of mistress in commerce and culture, — a metropolis 
 to which all the great roads of Asia converged, and from 
 which the wealth of the Euphrates and Tigris flowed down 
 through the great Persian Gulf to the ocean highway of 
 the ancient world ; " the glory of kingdoms, the beauty 
 of the Chaldees' excellency;" a city that could build walls 
 fifty miles in circumference, and terraced gardens on a 
 similar scale, upheld by columns and watered by hydraulic 
 engines, and river-walls and piers to match them ; that 
 combined every known form of industrial achievement and 
 productive craft; the confluence of all races, the home of 
 all beliefs, — that such a city became "heaps" because 
 of its moral and religious rottenness is simply incredible, 
 and would, if true, make it absurd to expect anything 
 from the highest capacities of mankind. Sodoms and 
 Gomorrahs on such a scale are preposterous. The de- 
 nouncers of Babylon were rebuked in after days by the 
 legend of Jahveh's own promise to Abraham, that ten 
 righteous men were enough to save a city; ^ and by 
 his plea with Jonah, " Thou hast had pity on the gourd 
 which came up in a night and perished in a night; and 
 should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are 
 more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern 
 between their right hand and their left hand?" 
 
 Whatever its morals, Babylon would doubtless have con- 
 tinued for ages to be the centre of Asiatic civilization, had 
 
 1 Rawlinson : Atici'eni Monarchies, ii. 50S. 
 * Genesis, xviii. 32. 
 
300 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 not Alexander's plans for its restoration been cut short by 
 death ; had not the Persians, at a later time, in their fear 
 of invasion by sea, broken the connection between the 
 Tigris and the Persian Gulf; had not, still later, the dis- 
 covery of an ocean passage to India destroyed that land 
 traffic of which Babylon was the entrepot, and which our 
 own days are bringing afresh into its ancient track. The 
 vices of Belshazzar's semi-mythic court had less to do with 
 Babylon's desolation than the removal of the Achaemen- 
 idan seat of empire to Susa, and the change from Chaldean 
 culture to Persian military ambition in Western Asia, which 
 required a new metropolis and a new basis of nationality. 
 Still more conclusive against the Bible-theory is the actual 
 record of Babylon's influence on universal history, — on 
 the one hand direct and visible, on the other indirect and 
 invisible ; of Babylon after the flesh, and Babylon in the 
 spirit. What if her undisputed mastery of the Asiatic 
 world lasted less than a century? It was long enough 
 to gather the scattered lights of past ages into one flame, 
 and transmit to the next master of nerve-power in this 
 process of historic growth what he would never have had 
 the philosophy to concentrate, nor the patience to search 
 out; long enough to mingle the physical stamina and 
 crude capacity of a hundred heterogeneous tribes with 
 the best organic life of wealth and culture that had then 
 been attained, — and thus to make Greece, Judea, Arabia, 
 and through them Europe and America, her unceasing 
 debtors. 
 
 Babylon became " heaps ; " but when a thousand years 
 have passed over those " heaps," antiquity itself arises out 
 of them, and holds forth the lost fragments of history that 
 prove humanity an unbroken evolution, a movement to uni- 
 versal ends. When Ker Porter's troop first approached 
 the mound of Birs-Nimrud, they saw its desolate summit 
 in possession of three magnificent lions, who moved majes- 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 30I 
 
 tically away at their approach, as if to reprove those nurs- 
 lings of the ages for forgetting that Babylon, though a 
 shadow, was still a 'throne for kings. ^ 
 
 It has hardly been imagined to what extent Persian civil- 
 ization was the product of Babylonian elements. A loose 
 congeries of nations, apparently with nothing in common 
 but the tendency to rebellion and separation, were trans- 
 mitted by Nabonidus to Cyrus, whose hands were so full 
 of conquests that he did little towards shaping political 
 order out of their fruits. But he received more than this 
 chaos of tendencies. We have traced through the Iranian 
 past an energetic germ of unity, in the pressure of ideal 
 motive into immediate act, which I have characterized as 
 nerve-power. The main spring of this energy of purpose 
 could be found only in personal Will. This was its earliest 
 ideal in the East, as it is its latest inspiration in Western 
 society and faith. Its advent on an ethnic scale was in 
 that Iranian exaltation of royal personages, as actual or 
 expectant masters of the world through force of will, of 
 which it is a popular error to suppose that Cyrus and his 
 successors were the founders. It was Iranian, before it 
 was Persian. First noted by the Greeks in the hosts pre- 
 cipitated on Europe by the nod of the king, it was yet, as 
 Yv'e have seen, the motive-force of those great empires 
 which had preceded his. The leader of a troop of moun- 
 taineers, Cyrus proved, — like the Assyrian, the Mede, the 
 Babylonian before him, only with far greater emphasis, — 
 that personal quality is master of mere human mass. The 
 immense power that belonged to this conviction was al- 
 ready a tradition of these nations, ready to pass from hand 
 to hand along the line of conquerors. So the spirit of 
 
 ^ Babylon, as the traveller sees it from the Birs-Nimrud to-day, is no desert. The date 
 groves, palms, and mulberry trees, the beautiful gardens, magnificent crops, and far-sffread 
 irrigation, make the scene as lovely as possible, and serve as a benediction of Nature on a 
 mighty historic mission long finished and fulfilled. (For description, see Geary's Travels 
 in Asiatic Turkey, chap. xii.J 
 
302 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Nineveh and Babylon moved in the arm of Cyrus when it 
 waved the dispersed Hebrews into national life, as when it 
 chastised the river Gyndes for drowning a sacred horse ; in 
 the rage of Xerxes casting fetters into the Hellespont; in 
 the self-invocation of every Achaemenidan on his stone tab- 
 lets, as sole " King of kings; king by grace of Ormuzd, 
 of this wide earth, afar and near." And at last Alexander 
 himself, pupil of Greek liberty, conquers Persian Babylon 
 only to assume the adored dress of Darius, to prescribe 
 prostration at his own feet, and demand at Susa, even of 
 the Greeks, that they should worship him as their god. 
 
 The Persian monotheist did but intensify the personal 
 monarchism of the older worship when he substituted one 
 sovereign will for the many gods in human form of the 
 Semitic and Turanian pantheon, whom he smote into the 
 dust. His symbol of Ornmzd, — a man flying in a winged 
 circle over the king's head, — belonged to Asshur, the god 
 of Assyria, before him. Here was a fit type of that nerve- 
 energy and resistless will by which the Persians carried to 
 a higher point the personal ideal of Nineveh and Babylon. 
 So the winged human-headed bulls of these cities, of simi- 
 lar purport, and the monsters that had typified terrible 
 powers of evil purpose, did but receive from the new dual- 
 ism of spiritual forces a more practical and realistic form 
 of the same meaning. The old Magian cultus of the ele- 
 ments, slowly built up by Cushite, Turanian, and Semite 
 combined, was also transmitted to the Persians, who ac- 
 cepted its worship of fire, its divining rods, and perhaps 
 its command to destroy noxious animals, and who prac- 
 tised at times, if we may believe Herodotus, its dreadful 
 rite of human sacrifice. Even the Babylonian Venus, 
 Anaitis,^ found admission at a later period into the reli- 
 gion of these scourgers of idolatry, even among the suc- 
 
 1 According to Hang, who refers to Windischmann {Essays, etc., p. 43), Anaitis is in the 
 old Yashts of the Avesta. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 303 
 
 cessors of that Cambyses who had stabbed the Egyptian 
 Apis and overturned his shrine. They took their writing 
 from the Assyrian cuneiform. Babylon furnished their 
 system of coinage ; Egypt and' Media, their dress; and into 
 their worship of Ormuzd they absorbed without change the 
 Semitic gods of their subject States.^ 
 
 Spiegel has traced many of the gods of the Zend-Avesta 
 directly to older Semitic originals,^ and it is but reasonable 
 to believe that the civilization of western Iran, which He- 
 rodotus entitled Persian, was in fact the resultant of the 
 manifold traditions and institutions deposited in succession 
 on the soil. But Persia brought also her own gift, her 
 distincti\^e function. As to what it was, we can judge 
 better after a brief survey of what we know as to the 
 origin and history of her people. On this matter the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, until recently the principal guide as 
 to the races of Western Asia, give very little information. 
 The ram and the butting goat of the book of Daniel con- 
 vey no idea of the difference of the Persian and Macedo- 
 nian empires ; nor do other Bibles throw much light on 
 the origin of the tribe which C}tus raised to the throne 
 of Asia. Cuneiform inscriptions, as early as the ninth 
 century before Christ, ■ — if we are not deceived by a re- 
 semblance of names, as Schrader thinks we are, — have 
 preserved the important fact that the " country of Par'sua " 
 (Persia) contained a very great number of independent 
 chiefs who submitted to the Assyrians.^ This is about 
 all we can learn from the stone-records, and the lively 
 Greeks yield nothing but mythic names. The early le- 
 gends of the Zend-Avesta, like those of the Hebrew Genesis, 
 may cover the religious antagonism of nomadic and settled 
 tribes, and the primeval warfare of their gods of night and 
 
 1 Spiegel: Siudien uber d. Zend-Avesta {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., 
 ix. 17S). Duncker: Gesc/iic/tU des A//eriAums, hd. ii. 626, 641. Herodotus, i. 135. 
 ^ Eran. Alterth., bd ii 
 8 Black obelisk Inscription of Shalmaneser II., and Inscription of Shamas Rimmon. 
 
304 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 day ; but, however ancient, these transformed traditions 
 and names throw no hght on the special facts of early 
 Persian history. On the origin of the monarchy formed 
 by union of the cognate tribes we have nothing but the 
 name of Achaemenes, who is given in the inscription of 
 Darius at Behistun, as the eponymous chief of his dynasty ; 
 though Darius speaks of himself as the ninth Achaemenidan 
 king, which implies that there were five of the race before 
 Achaemenes, the line having probably been interrupted by 
 the conquest of Persia by the Medes.^ Achaemenes there- 
 fore, if a real person, was not the founder of the monarchy, 
 and we find no record as to who was. The Persian was 
 more interested in recording how his " spear reached afar, 
 seeking war far from his land," than in remembering his 
 tribal origin, which was probably humble enough. We 
 do not even know whether, previous to Cyrus, his country 
 was a satrapy of Media, or a kingdom paying tribute, 
 though that it was the former is by far the more prob- 
 able. Herodotus relates the Median conquest, and brings 
 Cyrus, through his mother, into the royal family, not of 
 Persia, but of Media.^ 
 
 Who, then, were the Persians? The only reply is, — a 
 torrent which descended from its mountain home, and 
 swept all Western Asia into its current almost at one 
 bound, but left no record by which we can trace it to its 
 springs. The typical race of Iran, the Persians, have 
 given their name to its history at every phase ; yet we 
 do not even know whether this name comes from that 
 of their principal tribe, or is the Greek form of the 
 " Parsu " or " Bartsu " of the inscriptions. Of the Greek 
 historians, our earliest informant, Herodotus, lived but a 
 century after Cyrus ; yet his account of that historic per- 
 son is, by his own statement, but one of three ways of 
 
 1 See Oppert's translation of the Behistun Inscription, and his note. Records of the Past, 
 vii. 87 2 Herodotus vs. Xenophon. Herodotus, i. n2. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 305 
 
 telling the story, either of which he was at liberty to se- 
 lect, and is evidently to a great degree mythical. His 
 authorities are Median and Babylonian, and he knows so 
 little of the old Persian religion that he does not even men- 
 tion Ormuzd or the two principles of the Avesta-faith, but 
 describes a kind of element-cult instead, which is perhaps 
 Magism, — a product of Turanian, Semitic, and Median be- 
 liefs. Nevertheless, he is the best existing authority, now 
 that we know how to study his honest work. Ctcsias, who 
 wrote a century later, was a physician at the Persian court 
 at Susa, and knew the traditions of the monarchy ; but his 
 reputation for honesty is very bad, and his credulity is be- 
 yond example. Xenophon, on the other hand, has given 
 in his " Cyropaedia " a splendid philosophical romance. 
 Neither of these, nor any other author, can enlighten the 
 darkness of Persian origins. Even the old heroic legend 
 of Firdusi, while it makes the local chiefs its theme, and 
 describes the feudal liberties of the various States of a 
 great confederacy, throws no special light on the Per- 
 sians before Cyrus. 
 
 But Herodotus' straightforward picture of the Persians 
 of Cyrus' time bears every mark of truth. It has never 
 been contradicted; and it thoroughly explains their mar- 
 vellous career. Only this makes us pause, — that the Per- 
 sians whom he must have seen, the actual rulers of 
 Western Asia, were obviously very different from the 
 Persians of his picture. Did he really see at Babylon 
 many of the conquering race? Was his account of them 
 a tradition in the memories of the conquered people, not 
 yet effaced by time? Or how otherwise could he have 
 penetrated through the luxurious and barbarous degene- 
 racy of the Persians of his day, — of which he was fully 
 aware, since he refers it to the influence of Media, — to 
 the ideal he gives us of a hardy mountain tribe, of rare 
 modesty, dignity, and self-discipline, a national personality 
 
 20 
 
306 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 SO compact and resolute that it wrought on the feebler 
 morale of the older races with the power of fate? The 
 startling contrast to all this, revealed in Plutarch's Life of 
 Artaxerxes Longimanus, the contemporary of Herodotus, 
 renders it a puzzle to comprehend how the old ideal Per- 
 sians could have been discerned except through traditional 
 survival in the minds of their subjects. On the other 
 hand, such a reputation speaks forcibly for the truth of the 
 picture. And there are good grounds in the character of 
 the historian why we should separate the psychological 
 part of it from the mythological, and accord to the one a 
 credence we must refuse to the other. 
 
 That the Persians of Cyrus were the ideal of all the 
 Greek historians does not prove that the picture itself was 
 purely ideal. Nothing but the force of truth seems likely 
 to have extorted such tributes from a people who habitu- 
 ally regarded other races as barbarians, and who must 
 have been specially jealous of the rapid rise to empire of 
 a rude mountain tribe, whose arms were reaching down to 
 the shores of the ^gean. The mingled contempt and fear 
 felt by the Ionian cities toward this Iranian horde advanc- 
 ing upon them over the ruins of Nineveh is illustrated by 
 the advice given to Crcesus by his courtiers, not to waste 
 his time and labor in subjugating these poverty-stricken 
 and worthless barbarians, who, once in Lydia, might do 
 mischief^ But a stronger witness to the truth of Hero- 
 dotus' tribute is found in certain vestiges of those hardy 
 and heroic manners surviving in the well-known institu- 
 tions of the later Achaemenide empire. Plutarch tells us 
 that the kings of Persia at that period still ate figs and 
 drank milk at their coronation, in memory of the ancestral 
 customs of their race.^ Xenophon, who may be trusted 
 when he speaks of the Persians of his own day, says they 
 still retained the robust educational principles and general 
 
 ^ Herodotus,!. 71. 2 /,y^ of Artaxerxes. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 307 
 
 institutions which he describes as those of Cyrus' time, but 
 carried them out in a very perverted way ; and he notices 
 the continuance of many ancient customs, such as bringing 
 only small-sized bottles to their feasts and making only 
 one meal a day, which were managed so as to defeat their 
 original purpose. He evidently follows the general tradi- 
 tion when he holds the luxury and cruelty of the court of 
 Persia as all the worse for the heroic manners from which 
 it had fallen away.^ The rugged tribes devoted to their 
 chiefs, led by Gyrus from their herds and hunting-grounds 
 to startle the pampered Lydians, with their spare diet and 
 clothing of skins, living on what they could get, strangers 
 to wine and wassail, schooled in manly exercises, cleanly 
 even to superstition, so loyal to age and filial duties that 
 parricide was inconceivable to them, hating falsehood as 
 something atrocious, may well be needed to explain cer- 
 tain subsequent traits which Herodotus has recorded of 
 the Persians of his own time,^ — their pride of personal in- 
 dependence, that held the owing of a debt the next worse 
 thing to telling a he, and despised the markets of Greek 
 cities as schools of trickery; ^ their scorn of talking about 
 things that ought not to be done ; their care to wean their 
 affections from over-dependence upon keeping their chil- 
 dren under their own sight; the high honors they paid to 
 their birthdays, and their esteem for another nation in pro- 
 portion to its relationship to themselves; their fondness 
 for social grades and regulated manners ; their feudal dig- 
 nities, the chiefs giving counsel to the king, even while 
 thoroughly submissive to his person, just as Gyrus himself 
 had been in these conferences but as primus inter pares, 
 and laid before the Persian nobles his plan of rebellion 
 against the Mede ; the strong instinct of national impor- 
 tance and destiny, which grew naturally out of this personal 
 
 1 Cyropcedia, viii. i8. 2 Herodotus, i. 138, 139. 
 
 * Ibid., i. 153. 
 
308 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 pride and force of will, and which made every man a part 
 of the public purpose, working and praying for the whole 
 nation, and particularly for the king's welfare, esteeming 
 prowess even beyond progeny; above all, their stirring 
 ambition to lose themselves in the great world-current, 
 owing partly to magnetic sympathy and passion for per- 
 sonal contact, and partly to the sense of guidance by a 
 victorious star, so that they were " readiest of all nations 
 to accept foreign customs," and became apt pupils of 
 Median excess.^ 
 
 It would seem that nothing but the palpable per- 
 sistence of those qualities to which had been traced the 
 victorious career of the early Persians could have caused 
 the Greek writers to pay such tributes as they did to the 
 later civilization of the empire, in spite of its equally pal- 
 pable depravity. It was no doubt only in the line of 
 Xenophon's fine fiction to represent this people as teach- 
 ing; their children virtues as those of other nations were 
 taught letters ; ^ but Herodotus, Plutarch, Strabo, Ctesias, 
 Curtius, Ammianus, Josephus, all of whom professed to 
 write genuine history, point us likewise to their laws 
 against ingratitude, against capital punishment for a first 
 offence or without trial, against harsh treatment of house- 
 holds ; ^ to the custom of setting the services of a slave 
 against his offences in deciding on his punishment ; to that 
 of sometimes substituting the dress of a culprit for his 
 person in inflicting the penalty ; ^ to that of deliberating 
 on public matters over their cups, but deciding only when 
 sober ;^ to their signal valor at Plataea and Mycale ; to 
 their habitual reward of brave and noble conduct, in both 
 sexes alike; to the interpretation of law by appointed 
 judges ; ^ to their belief that nothing was so servile as lux- 
 
 1 Herodotus, i. 132-136. * Cyropisdia, i. 2. 
 
 3 Herodotus, i. 137. ^ Brisson: De Regno Persarztm, p. 593. 
 
 6 Herodotus, i. 133. 6 Brisson, pp. 191, 192. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 309 
 
 ury, nothing so royal as toil ; to their religious respect for 
 promises,^ — most of which had doubtless such practical 
 validity as an absolute monarchy might allow.'^^ But these 
 writers have not failed to notice how the intense loyalty of 
 the elder time had degenerated into servility so absolute 
 that the king expected to be thanked by the subject for the 
 punishment he inflicted, and injustice itself was scored by 
 its victim as a benefit; ^ a servility that amounted to wor- 
 ship, and accepted death as the penalty for proposing 
 anything which should displease the king."^ They have 
 faithfully recorded such atrocities as burying men alive 
 in honor of the elements; flaying judges for bribery; 
 mutilation and stoning; acts of the cruellest caprice; 
 and the shameless crimes of a court life, where monsters 
 of the harem, male and female, ruled with shocking facility 
 the weakest and the wickedest of tyrants. 
 
 It may help to reconcile these puzzling contrasts of 
 Persian character if we regard the later Achaemenidae as 
 simply showing what results imperial self-idolatry had 
 produced even in the line which had borne a Cyrus and 
 a Darius, and which might, but for the fate of war, have 
 found in the younger Cyrus a restorer of its ancient glory. 
 Nor is it fair to judge the people of Persia by the vices of 
 a court possessed by a fury like Parysatis, or a beast like 
 Ochus. They retained the energy to hold their immense 
 empire till another world-conqueror appeared in Alexan- 
 der; and they preserved their hold on the imaginative and 
 ideal interest of the Greek republics, whose whole political 
 history also was swayed by the wonderful resources of 
 " the great king." A glance at their psychological quali- 
 ties will perhaps indicate how an excess of nervous energy, 
 unbalanced by contemplation or by associated industry, 
 
 1 Brisson, p. 187. 
 
 - Brisson, p. 4SS, from Vlutzrch.' s A /exander. Brisson, p. 596, from Josephus and Xenophon, 
 
 3 Brisson, pp. 48, 49, from Stobseus' Sermojies, xii. 
 
 * Brisson, p. 49, from Varro, xii. 
 
3IO POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 consumed itself in its own fires, till the central bases of 
 authority gave way. 
 
 It has already been stated that the Persians, who ulti- 
 mately mastered and absorbed all the tribes from Bactria 
 to Semitic Assyria and Babylonia, may be taken as the 
 typical Iranian race. Shown in their early monuments, as 
 well as in their living representatives, the Tajiks and the 
 Guebres, to have possessed an athletic and elegant phy- 
 sique and highly impressible senses, these Persians, — the 
 Asiatic Greeks, — described as having oval faces, raised 
 features, well-arched eyebrows, and large dark eyes, now 
 soft as the gazelle's, now flashing with quick insight, were 
 the antipodes of those stunted, square-faced, heavy and 
 short-limbed Mongolian tribes, with which, under the name 
 of Turan, they have waged incessant war. They were ex- 
 tremely receptive of moods, biasses, passions ; the aptest 
 learners, as they were the boldest adventurers of the East; 
 not patient to study, not skilled to invent, but swift to 
 seize, appropriate, and distribute; terrible breakers-up of 
 old religious spells ; Promethean conductors of monopo- 
 lized fire out into world-wide use ; mediators between the 
 sealed thought of the East and the stirring life of the 
 West; and, with all their absolutism, the heralds of lib- 
 erty. They dissolved the stern old material civilizations 
 of Cushite and Turanian origin, and made them flow to 
 fertilize history, as they had already irrigated the Mesopo- 
 tamian plains. What magnetic attractions ; what passion 
 for vast conquests ; what quickness to learn the arts of sen- 
 suality and display ! Persian magnificence lasts to the very 
 end; from Achaemenidan to Seljuk Turk, from Darius to 
 Alp-Arslan, the boundless ambition, the prodigality and 
 pomp, the sweep of self-deification went on, with every 
 successive dynasty that touched this soil, Parthian, Sas- 
 sanide, Mongol, still thrilling with the old nerve-currents 
 of this race; for Khosru, for Timur, the star of empire 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 31I 
 
 forever beckoned. Herodotus makes Xerxes say to his no- 
 bles, " The Persians have never been quiet since the con- 
 quests of Cyrus ; a deity is our guide, and ever assures us 
 of triumph." " In olden times," says ^schylus, " a divine 
 destiny compelled the Persians to demolish cities, and to 
 brave with the frail tackling of their host-bearing ships the 
 stormy ocean fields." 
 
 Here was a new fact in the Oriental world, — a race that 
 believed alike in the actual and the ideal, holding firmly to 
 both terms, following infinite longings like children, and 
 mastering finite means like gods ; no Hindu mysticism 
 ignoring the seen ; no Chinese matter-of-fact slipping 
 away from the unseen. Every sculptured rock and every 
 formula of prayer attests a religious earnestness not to be 
 stiffened into ritual, or hardened into stone. So quick a 
 sense of the ideal and so real an aspiration towards it 
 could only be satisfied by constantly recognizing the 
 higher personality of each individual as a real presence 
 {Fi'avashi) hovering above his actual form, as protector and 
 guide. The Highest God has his Fravasln, and commands 
 Zoroaster to praise it.^ Not less has every creature, for 
 none can exist without its ideal, — the typical form to which 
 it aspires, and through which it has life and strength.^ 
 These Fravashis were the better life of the universe, the 
 blessedness of souls, invisible and serene ; and with simple 
 devoutness the Persian carved and painted them on his 
 public works, and felt their mighty stress in the ardor of 
 his practical will. Not less significant is his substitution 
 of the ascending line in architecture for the horizontal 
 style of Assyrian art. 
 
 This psychological sketch will be seen to illustrate suf- 
 ficiently our position that the Persian mind was not the 
 pure brain, not the passive muscle, but the flame-conductor 
 between them, — in other words, nerve; and as India and 
 
 1 Spiegel: Vendidad, xix. 46. - Ksfw^i, xvil, 43; xxiii. ; liv. i. 
 
312 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 China, in all they did, showed an overplus of these two 
 mental elements respectively, so Persia had this third or 
 mediative element in excess. 
 
 We must not fail to note that all the Iranian races were 
 more or less of the same type. Those splendid empires 
 of Babylonia, Assyria, Media, and Persia, each in turn 
 gathering these races into a single impulse or a suc- 
 cession of impulses, to be dissolved as swiftly as the great 
 battery could well be discharged, blazing with perpetual 
 jets of conquest and revolt, we may well, I think, call 
 flashes of nerve-power. Spasmodic, irresistible, the first 
 rush of this living lightning that man had felt within him, 
 they spent themselves on the passionate effort to turn the 
 human world into the play of their magnificent dreams. 
 But the genius of the Persians Hfted this element to its 
 ideal form. Well might they take the sun for their em- 
 blem, and call their kings by its name.^ Well might the 
 flashing globe be hoisted on the royal tent, and the golden 
 eagle on the standards, when their glorious Mithra arose 
 above the eastern mountains, giving the sign for the march 
 of those vast armies resplendent with all the circumstance 
 of courts and cities, sweeping the tribes info their torrent, 
 and pouring them on in heat ungovernable till they broke 
 in quivering fragments on the balanced solidity of Greek 
 genius. " The impetuous lord of many-peopled Asia," 
 sings yEsch}-lus again, " urges his godlike armament 
 against every land." - 
 
 But the ruin of the Persian was not the Greek phalanx 
 only, or even chiefly.'^ Like the Hercules of the solar 
 myth, seen on his gorgeous funeral pyre in the western 
 sky, the Persian perished in his own fires. Cyrus indeed, 
 the great, mild, generous conqueror, father of his people, 
 
 ^ Plutarch: Life of Artaxerxes. - Perses. 
 
 s The Greeks really had little or no strategy; still less discipline. The accounts of 
 tremendous losses by Persians in battle are probably exaggerations. See Mahafiy : Rambles 
 in Greece, p. 194. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA 
 
 idol of Greek philosophy and romance, of Plato and Xeno- 
 phon alike, in his short reign of thirty years (558-529 
 B. C.) made the little Persian satrapy or kingdom mas- 
 ter of Asia from the Jaxartes to the Phoenician coasts ; 
 and, victor in all he undertook, he lay down at last, say 
 most of his biographers, amid purple and gold, in his 
 green paradise, under the truest and loftiest of all royal 
 epitaphs, — " Here lies Cyrus, king of kings." ^ Only 
 death satirized his ambition. But Cambyses, master of 
 nations, must needs master Nature too, and so led his hosts 
 against the sands of Egypt and Ethiopia, and the oasis 
 of Ammon ; and being discomfited, he came back an epi- 
 leptic madman, to vent his rage on the priests of Apis and 
 their sacred calf,^ to violate temples and tombs, outrage his 
 household, defy the traditions of his ancestral faith, bury 
 his subjects alive, and die of fury on the news of a revo- 
 lution, leaving no trace behind him in the Nile. And 
 then Darius, the great organizer, and as humane as he was 
 wise and thrifty, so beloved of Egypt for his friendliness 
 to her people and her gods that they gave him alone the 
 worship giv^en their native kings, yet ventures not only to 
 bridge the Bosphorus, but to cast a heterogeneous host of 
 near a million men upon the Thracian wilderness to fight 
 with famine and fire more than with human foes, escaping 
 thence indeed through his wonderful personal resource, 
 and effecting something beyond astonishing a zone of un- 
 explored barbarians, since centuries elapsed before Persia 
 suffered again from Scythian hordes. Then Xerxes, 
 " yoking the ocean, equalling the gods," ^ hurls a similar 
 swarm upon Greece, set on by dreams and visions against 
 
 1 So says the monument, which is apparently genuine. Herodotus has preserved the 
 tradition that he died in a campaign against the barbarians of Scythia, and that his body 
 was barbarously treated, i. 214. 
 
 2 But see Brugsch Bey about these stories (Egypt tinder the Pharaohs, chap. xix. ), 
 especially that o£ Apis. Cambyses was as full of the idea of universal dominion as Cyrus. 
 But Wiedemann affirms their truth {Gesch. d. Aegypt., p. 230). 
 
 s Aeschylus : Pence. 
 
314 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 all good advice ; and after praying to be permitted to sub- 
 jugate Europe, and answering prayers of Greek refugees 
 in the manner of a god, fares worse than the rest. The 
 splendid bubble of European and African conquest which 
 his father had put to his lips burst on their eager touch. 
 
 Persian failures were mainly due to the vast scale upon 
 which enterprises were projected and prepared. Ten 
 thousand could have penetrated the deserts better than a 
 million. A small army of picked troops might have made 
 front in Greece after Salamis, but the huge horde took 
 fright at its own unwieldiness, and the " king of kings " 
 was the victim of a panic ; and though Mardonius had 
 still a great host, the prestige was gone, and his army, 
 like a swarm of locusts, became dead heaps on the land 
 and in the sea. The unity and discipline of Xenophon's 
 famous Ten Thousand made them more than a match 
 for the unmanageable levies of Artaxerxes Mnemon, and 
 their retreat succeeded simply because the Persians had 
 no organization, and no plan for cutting it off. Then the 
 subject States revolted everywhere, and the throne of the 
 Acha^menides crumbled away. 
 
 This empire militant was the overflow of unregulated 
 redundant force, hurled forth in gushes of heady drift, and 
 as reckless of waste as a strong boy in the heat of play. 
 It was a rare combination of magnificence with industry, 
 of energy and impressibility. For this thirsty oxygen 
 rushed into the world of sense, with keen relish for all its 
 savors, and plucked ideal raptures from all. The earth 
 was nard and roses, let it come in what pungency it would. 
 This royalty must represent the universe. It appropriated 
 the best of all things; called its builders out of Phoenicia 
 and Egypt, and its physicians from Greece.^ To the 
 splendid court of the Achaemenidae all beings and climes 
 must be tributary, all tributes without stint ; their harems 
 
 1 Herodotus, iii. 130; vii. 25, 34. Diodorus, i. 46. 
 
* BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 315 
 
 the rifling of continents, watched by unsexed guards, the 
 last refinement of jealousy and the self-irony of lust; their 
 tables spread for fifteen thousand daily, though the king 
 himself dined alone, and often frugally; their water brought 
 in silver from the Choaspes, their salt from the Libyan 
 desert, their wine from Syria, and their wheat from yEolia; 
 a thousand pounds of incense came yearly from Arabia; 
 from Armenia tens of thousands of horses and hundreds 
 of thousands of sheep; from Assyria five hundred eunuch- 
 boys to serve at feasts ; where, too, they had large towns, 
 all whose revenues went for breeding dogs, and royal 
 stables "on an enormous scale; and the daily tribute to 
 the satrap amounted to a bushel of silver.^ Megacreon 
 of Abdera in a sally of wit advised his fellow-citizens to go 
 to the temples and thank the gods that Xerxes dined but 
 once a day. 
 
 The provincial satraps repeated all this on a smaller 
 scale, though with the king's spies beside them, official 
 " eyes and ears," to report their wealth and what became 
 of it. Then there were the nobles, clothed in purple, with 
 painted eyebrows and false hair and stilted heels, covered 
 with jewels and perfumes, protected by gloves and parasols 
 against cold and heat ; so that Herodotus found a reason 
 for the special softness of their skulls.^ The summer and 
 winter palaces rose on the heights of Susa, Ecbatana, Per- 
 sepolis, story above story, of wondrously jointed, massive 
 stones, light and graceful, open like the Greek temple to 
 air and sky, on gigantic platforms set with forests of lofty 
 fluted pillars, not like the Median, of cypress and cedar, 
 but of marble, and soaring through them more than sixty 
 feet, with capitals of bulls or griffins resting on the lotos 
 leaf, the ideal forms of ancient art.^ Dreamy and delicious 
 
 1 Heeren : Asiatic Nations, i. 89, 159, 260, et seq. Herodotus, i. 188, 192. Duncker 
 from Ctesias, ii. 610. Gibbon, xxiii., xxiv. 
 
 ^ Duncker, ii. 626. 627, from Herodotus. Herodotus, iii. 12. 
 ^ Rawlinson : Ancient Monarchies, iii. 304. 
 
3l6 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 with paradises, terraces, and hanging gardens on a colossal 
 scale, Persia may well have wielded, even at that early day, 
 the magical spells which were in after times to be woven 
 about the world by her fountains, nightingales, roses, and 
 wine.-^ 
 
 Yet it is obvious that results so prodigious were not 
 achieved by an enervated race. This luxurious people 
 obeyed the sturdy rules of Zoroaster. These world-absorb- 
 ing kings, who had on their tables the first fruits of every 
 land, were themselves under an ancient law not to eat or 
 drink anything but native products.^ They were irrigating 
 the plains of Babylonia with all the old energy which had 
 enabled their Semitic predecessors to draw three harvests 
 a year from the fertile alluvion ; ^ and a third of their 
 revenue is said to have come from this satrapy alone."* 
 " No spot on the globe, Egypt perhaps excepted, displays 
 such masonry as the walls of Persepolis." ^ The Persians 
 rejected the sun-dried brick of Babylonian architecture, 
 and the thin slab-facings of Assyrian, and built platform 
 and pile of solid stone. It was not a frivolous people that 
 lifted those graceful pillar-stems which twenty-four cen- 
 turies have not stirred. Great roads, beset with post-sta- 
 tions, and traversed by government couriers, " swifter, 
 according to some," says Xenophon, " than the crane 
 flies," ^ carried safely a vast and busy intercourse, reach- 
 ing from the steppes of Tartary to the shores of Greece. 
 Over all these regions the genius of Darius organized 
 under a single system, political and financial, the preg- 
 nant intermixture of races brought about by Assyrian 
 wars and deportations. Nor did the innate preference 
 of his people for agriculture prevent him from attempt- 
 ing to open canal communication between the Nile and 
 
 * See Ebers' novel, An Egyptian Princess. ^ Athenseus, bk. xiv, 
 
 ^ Xenophon : CEconomicus. * Herodotus, i. 192. 
 
 5 Heeren, i. 151. ^ Herodotus, viii. gS. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 317 
 
 the Red Sea, only failing at last from some discovery as 
 to the depth of level between the waters, or some other 
 cause; and his travelling court and camp was itself the 
 best market in the world. But for these constructive ener- 
 gies of the Persian kings, Alexander would have found no 
 foothold for the lasting marriage of Europe with Asia, 
 whose forerunners had crossed the floating bridge flung 
 by Darius across the waters of the Bosphorus. The flour- 
 ishing condition of Egypt when visited by Herodotus is 
 ample witness to the excellence of Persian rule,^ though 
 the barbarous rage of Ochus against her gods, after the 
 reconquest of Egypt, rivalled the worst excesses of Cam- 
 byses in his madness. 
 
 The Persian instructed his children to ride, to shoot, and 
 to speak the truth.^ He rose with the sun, was used to 
 bread-and-water diet at home and acorns and Avild fruits 
 on the hunt. When he was seen on foot, he was at work ; 
 when not at work, the noble steed was his idol and compan- 
 ion. He really scorned those who scorned toil. When the 
 younger Cyrus led Lysander through his pleasure-grounds 
 at Sardis, and told him he had planned and planted them 
 with his own hands, the aristocratic Spartan k>oked incred- 
 ulously on his golden chains and gorgeous robes. " I 
 swear to you as a servant of Mithra," exclaimed the Prince, 
 " that I never taste food till on my brows is the sweat of 
 toil." 2 Strabo says, from Onomacritus, that the tomb of 
 Darius bore the inscription: " Among the hunters I took 
 the palm ; what I would do, that I could." ^ Artaxerxes 
 wore upon his person the worth of twelve thousand tal- 
 ents, yet shared the hardships of his army on the march, 
 carrying quiver and shield, leading the way up the steepest 
 places, and lightening the hearts of his soldiers by footing 
 it twenty-five miles a day. The common people had a 
 
 1 Wiedemann : Gesck. d. Aegypt., pp. 243, 239- ^ Herodotus, i. 136. 
 
 2 Xenophon : CEconomicus, p. 6. * Strabo, bk. xv. 
 
3l8 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 religious respect for cultivating the earth and for preserv- 
 ing its signs of productive power. ^ They were loath to 
 cut down ancient trees merely for fuel ; but Artaxerxes 
 solved their scruples by himself laying the axe to the finest 
 one in his paradise, and letting the whole go freely to 
 make night fires for his shivering men.^ Their worship of 
 Ormuzd made them watch and work with religious zeal, 
 and obey the laws of purity and health as the first of 
 duties. Their hatred of Ahriman made them wage life- 
 long warfare against the barrenness and the noxious crea- 
 tures that constituted his realm. Excess of loyalty to 
 the idea of personal sway, not baseness, explains their 
 amazing endurance under the cruelties of roj'al caprice. 
 Adorers of the Flame, they shared the spirit of their mad- 
 dest kings, and were as ready to throw away their lives on 
 an impossibility as the kings were to command it. In war 
 they were, beyond all the races they led forth, the terror 
 even of the Greeks. Heraclides of Pontus based on their 
 example his theory that luxury exalted men above little- 
 ness and fear.^ 
 
 What has been said of the old Iranian races is illustrated 
 in their sculpture. Of the wonderful vitality and vigor 
 of the Assyrian hunting and battle scenes, I have already 
 spoken. They are as realistic and practical as the Egyp- 
 tian paintings of a similar kind, but have a poetic ardor 
 of which that meditative race had no conception. The 
 details of real life are wrought in a glow of spontaneity, 
 by flashes of nerve-energy. The aim is not so much to 
 render the exact image of the action as to convey the 
 
 1 The agriculturalist was in honor ; he is mentioned in the A vesta as the third class, after 
 priest and soldier, and before tradesmen. Ya^na, xix. i8. In the Hindu system there is a 
 trading but no farming caste, unless the Sudra, or lowest, may be so considered. Moreover, 
 the order of the Persian classes, wliich are not castes, is not material, and implies no subordi- 
 nation. 
 
 2 Plutarch's Lives (Langhome), viii. 184. 
 
 3 Athenasus, xii. Also Julian's tribute, in his Ciestirs, to the valor and politeness of 
 the Persians (Gibbon). 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 319 
 
 significance of it in art. There is no literalism about it; 
 and it even contains hints of unconscious symbolism. 
 
 In some respects, Persian sculpture falls behind Assy- 
 rian. There is equal stiffness of outlines and failure of 
 perspective, with certainly less elaboration of detail. But 
 the ideal aspiration overflows all defects, and shows itself, 
 both by choice of subjects and mode of treatment, to be 
 the supreme gift of the Persian. Instead of common and 
 domestic life, here are heroic combats of men with beasts, 
 triumphant marches or processions bearing tributes, kings 
 at worship or upon thrones; and always the literal fact 
 melts into the symbol, the human meaning beyond and 
 above it. The fighting bulls and lions are not brutes, but 
 massive human strength and energy of will. You do not 
 see this or that king fulfilling his functions ; you see roy- 
 alty, war, worship, in their significance for sense and soul.^ 
 There stands — Darius, it may be, the "king of kings," with 
 plain fillet on his brow, short dress and naked arms, and a 
 poise of limb that seems to make living force an attribute 
 of repose ; with one hand he grasps the horn of a semi- 
 human monster, with the other drives the dagger home. 
 There again, with equal majesty, he masters the man-like 
 lion or the wild ass. There his human god is hovering 
 above him in winged circle, and his right foot rests upon 
 a prostrate man. Nine kings stand before him, low of 
 stature, with bare heads and bound hands; and this the 
 inscription: "When the lands rebelled against me, I fought 
 nineteen battles and took captive nine kings : it was through 
 the grace of Ormuzd that I did it. Thou who shalt be king 
 hereafter, beware of sin, and punish it. So shall thy realm 
 be invincible." ^ 
 
 We shall better understand what force there is in this 
 term nerve, as applied to the Iranian races (Lydians, Baby- 
 lonians, Assyrians, Medes, Persians), when we have fully 
 
 1 Kugler : Gesch. d. Baukunst^ i. 73-75, 94. ' Records of tlie Past, i. 126, 127. 
 
320 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 considered the fact that, whether Semite or Aryan, they 
 were all worshippers of the Flame. What indeed but Fire 
 could symbolize that ambition which no enterprise was 
 vast enough to match, that sensuous susceptibility that 
 turned everything into food for passionate desire. Yet 
 the nobler elements of the moral ideal, — magnanimity, 
 ardor, devotion to the best, — are also equally natural 
 fruits of that " purity in thought, word, and deed," which 
 Zoroaster taught his followers was the meaning of the 
 creative Fire. A devouring flame is like the lusty youth 
 of human aspiration, as these races made manifest: un- 
 disciplined, capable of ideal good and ideal evil, their 
 darkness and their light were two warring powers for the 
 conquest of the world. The lassitude and exhaustion of 
 their mighty efforts, the despotic license and caprice that 
 constructed world-empires, the swift disintegration of ill- 
 organized power; the gigantic sweep of vision and desire, 
 the impulse to universality, the sense of movement never to 
 pause nor turn back, — what word shall express the mean- 
 ing and function of all this in the development of man? 
 
 Frequent as its analogue may be in the life of individ- 
 uals, the phenomenon will never again be seen in the his- 
 tory of nations. Psychologically, as well as geographically, 
 Iran was the transition from Oriental to Western civiliza- 
 tion. Never again can the psychical brain, muscle, nerve 
 of the human races be so separated that in each civilization 
 one element shall be in overwhelming excess of the others, 
 as these studies have shown them to have been in the 
 Hindu, the Chinese, and the Persian civilizations previous 
 to the maturer fusion of these forces in the development 
 of Europe, which has in fact been in this respect the 
 flowering of the mediative Iranian type of mind. The 
 intercourse of races, the fusion of temperaments and be- 
 liefs, the scientific knowledge and rise of universal laws, 
 has insured a more balanced activity of the human facul- 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 32 1 
 
 ites in every civilized people than was possible under the 
 older isolating conditions. Yet we have also seen that 
 the vital germs of all that we now hold to be best were 
 vigorous enough to prove, even in these fragmentary ethnic 
 types, that the moral and spiritual nature needed no super- 
 natural grafting nor change of law. What was needed is 
 equally plain. In place of the pure thought of the Hindu 
 and the plodding work of the Chinese, wc have now a 
 third type, which conducts the cerebral into muscular 
 energy, and makes both effective. The Iranian mind was 
 thus the first mediator on an ethnic scale between thought 
 and work, ideal and real, mind and its material, and there- 
 fore the harbinger of progress. We may say that the 
 function of Persia, as its leading representative, was to be 
 herald of the claims of the infinite to mould the finite, 
 of the ideal to become real; but herald only because its 
 special quality always was in excess. What India and 
 China represented is not therefore superseded. Without 
 due balance from brain and muscle, the ncrvc-fire must 
 consume itself And so we who inherit in special the gift 
 of Iran are working out those of India and China too, but 
 under freest conditions; which must create a fourth type 
 of mind, including more than brain, muscle, and nerve, 
 because it is these in the proper unity of their relations. 
 
 To arrive at the full meaning of our relation to the Ira- 
 nians, we must translate the physiological symbol into 
 philosophical terms, which represent the self-affirmation 
 of the ideal in its cruder stage ; namely, as has been said, 
 the exaltation, or worship, of personal Will. Deficient in 
 the cerebral and muscular types of mind, this factor con- 
 joins the two in the form of a concentrated energy of aim. 
 Will, the true force of personality, is thus the supreme 
 ideal of those races whose life is not in thought as thought, 
 nor in work as work, but in the act of converting the one 
 into the other ; that is, in action itself as action. The his- 
 
 21 
 
322 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 tory of this ideal is written in the faiths and cultures whose 
 cradle is Western Asia, and whose maturity constitutes 
 modern civilization. We live amid its closing epochs, 
 full of the foregleams of a higher and better worship than 
 that of personal Will ; and the study of its opening phases, 
 in the Iranian empires, so typical of what has succeeded 
 them, will greatly help us to understand where we are. 
 
 The self-deification of Iranian monarchs was simply a 
 political expression of the faith of their peoples in the 
 ideal of personal Will. However rapidly leaving behind 
 them the extremes of what is called " personal govern- 
 ment," Europe and America still embody this ideal in their 
 anthropomorphic religious beliefs. They deify not only 
 the higher forms of human virtue, but also human qualities 
 fully in keeping with Oriental autocracy in its worst forms. 
 Assyrian or Persian royal barbarities pale before the sys- 
 tematic cruelty ascribed to the God of Christian creeds, 
 and defended in his name. The worship of the Achaemc- 
 nidan king was thus in its evil as well as its good the nat- 
 ural germ of the worship of a Christ. A personal Divine 
 Will is at the root of both forms of incarnation, however 
 different in many, moral and spiritual respects may be the 
 Zoroastrian and the Christian God. These specially reli- 
 gious bearings of the subject will hereafter come under 
 consideration. At present we must show how thoroughly 
 the ancient Persians represented the nerve-type, the author- 
 ity of personal Will. 
 
 The testimony of Greek and native writers makes it 
 highly probable that the old Persians inherited the social 
 organization which recent researches have shown to lie at 
 the base of Indo-European as well as Sclavonic and Mon- 
 golian society, — that of the Village Community, where the 
 family household was the social unit, expanded by adop- 
 tion and other fictions into clans bound together by tra- 
 ditional usages and more or less hereditary functions. But 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 323 
 
 however this may have been, we find them advanced to a 
 higher stage of individuahsm for which the mere village 
 community afforded no place. While many of the tribes 
 were free nomads, the most appear to have been agricul- 
 tural ; and society had developed into a congeries of clans, 
 which the Avesta describes as under the " chieftainship of 
 heads of families, of villages, of tribes, and of provinces, 
 with Zoroaster for the fifth," ^ and as divided into four 
 classes, " priests, soldiers, farmers, and artisans," among 
 whom there seems to have been no distinction, at least 
 as to choice of spiritual guides, which was " the duty of 
 every righteous man."^ 
 
 These chiefs (^Peldcvdndii) had become nobles in a kind 
 of feudal constitution, wherein the king was limited by 
 the free traditions of certain heroic families, or individ- 
 uals, who were often closely related to the royal house, 
 and had scarcely inferior following; led the armies of 
 the kingdom, could act the offended Achilles, if they 
 pleased, with great effect, and were, if they chose to be 
 so, the real pillars of the throne. They are the heroes of 
 the Persian epic,'^ and their allegiance appears to have 
 been a traditional loyalty rather than any sense of inferi- 
 ority.* They regard the king, as the Homeric heroes re- 
 gard Agamemnon, with conditional and provisional respect, 
 simply as meeting their necessity for gathering around a 
 central Will. This, it will be perceived, is obviously such 
 an putgrowth of the tribal patriarchalism which lies at the 
 basis of all ancient society, as would naturally become a 
 people in whom the worship of will was a growing instinct. 
 In nothing does this instinct more strongly appear than in 
 their intense feeling of the dignity of their own peVsons, 
 and of their divine function or commission as a people to 
 
 * K(Z{«3, xix. 17, 18. 
 
 * See also Spiegel: Era)i Alierth., bk. v. chap. i. ; Herodotus, i. 125. loi ; Spiegel, 
 i. 555 ; Hnug : Essays, etc., p. iSS. 
 
 3 Mauoshcihr, Sam, Zal, Rustem. •* Spiegel: Erdn Alterth., i. 555, 556. 
 
324 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 incarnate a kind of personal sovereignty. They were thor- 
 oughly aristocratic, therefore ; the worship of will is essen- 
 tially so, because it rests on an inherent right of command, 
 and would not be will if it had not subject powers. For 
 the Persian noble, his own dignity was a religious charge. 
 His education, so full of generous discipline and incentives 
 to public service, cut him off from the masses, who, as 
 Herodotus distinctly tells us, had not the means nor leisure 
 for such culture, free and open as it was. For his king he 
 must be ready to die, yet his own self-respect makes him 
 the king's counsellor; and neither Cyrus nor Darius does 
 aught of moment without consulting his peers. ^ The 
 Greeks with one accord put into their mouths, often 
 doubtless with truth, at least to custom, wise maxims and 
 brave advice. A conspiracy of seven nobles overturns the 
 usurper who pretended to the name of Smcrdis, as Cyrus 
 and his leagued nobles had revolted against the Mede. 
 By their united councils, according to Herodotus, every 
 form of government was canvassed, the monarchical de- 
 liberately selected, and Darius chosen as king by an appeal 
 to signs from heaven. They were called KhsJuicta {Shd/i), 
 the same as the king; dressed as he did, coined money,^ 
 held courts. He was only pddishdh, chief of the chiefs; 
 or SJidJidii-ShdJi, king of the kings of Iran, — and under 
 them were chiefs of lower order.^ 
 
 Observe the dignity to which these high-born Persian 
 wills were trained. Their education was not in reading 
 and writing, which are democratic, but in manners, — how 
 
 1 Gobineau's fascinating picture of the free life of the Iranian feudatories, whom Cyrus 
 changed to subjects, contains perhaps a good measure of truth. But its main sources are not 
 the Greek writers, but later traditions, Persian and Mussulman; and the Avesta throws but 
 little light on the subject. 
 
 2 " The right of coining money was a right inherent in every community in the Persian 
 empire, great or small. Local sovereigns and satraps exercised it during the whole period 
 of that empire." (Waddington, quoted in Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. J\lorgenl. Gesdlsch., xxi. 
 442.) Tlie Arsacide coins, investigated by Levy in this article, and shown to be the earliest 
 Pehlevi literature, prove this. 
 
 ^ Gobiueau : HUtoire des Perses, i. 467. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 325 
 
 to bear themselves towards each other. They were so 
 clothed that no naked part of the body appeared, to offend 
 another's eye ; they kept silence at meals ; they guarded 
 their emotions, allowed themselves no outbreak of surprise 
 or delight; did not spit or blow the nose before others; 
 at meeting they kissed, but spoke not, — a Spartan self- 
 restraint ; a Spanish hauteur and distance. 
 
 But better than this was their theory, at least, of moral 
 self-respect. To lie was cowardice ; the secret falsehood 
 that made one ashamed to look in his neighbor's eye was 
 the unpardonable sin. After lying, the greatest of sins was 
 to owe another, and so make oneself his slave. ^ The un- 
 spoken hint of honor in the pressure of the hand was the 
 most binding of pledges. Artaxerxes, according to Ctesias, 
 was persuaded by Megabyzus to hold to his promise of 
 pardon to a rebel, who was discovered after capture to have 
 murdered the king's brother.^ Laws against ingratitude 
 had their basis in the idea of falsehood implied by that 
 vice. This respect for truth and this horror of lying as 
 contamination are here very largely incidents of pride, and 
 associate the beginnings of personal worship with the sense 
 of honor and the law of duty. The cultivation of them had 
 become in the Persian nobles a tradition of their personal 
 dignity. In the history of personality as an ideal principle 
 their prevalence in the early civilizations is of great signifi- 
 cance, and will be more fully considered hereafter. Though 
 found at the threshold of all those ethnic faiths and forms 
 which conspired to the production of our own, they are 
 perhaps nowhere so emphasized as in Persian ethics. 
 Thucydides says of this people, that with them it was 
 held better to give than to receive. Their schools, ac- 
 cording to Xenophon, were placed aloof from the noises 
 of trade, that the eager passions of those who were hag- 
 gling with each other might not disturb their culture of 
 
 1 Plutarch: Artaxerxes. ^ Ctesias, 34-37. 
 
326 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 justice and self-control.^ He doubtless reports a traditional 
 ideaj at least, when he says that in his day the young nobles 
 were brought up at the court, that they might not see any- 
 thing immodest.^ Cyrus spurns the Greek cities on the 
 score of their great markets ; ^ and Strabo even says of 
 educated Persians, that they will have nothing to do with 
 buying and selling.* This would be contrary to Zoroas- 
 trian precept if it meant indolence, and served to distin- 
 guish them from the masses, who most certainly did labor, 
 and pay respect to whatever trading it involved. The Per- 
 sian cities did not show any lack either of toil or traffic. 
 It was natural enough for the national ideal of personal 
 dignity to have its extreme representatives in a class who 
 made pursuit of this ideal their exclusive business, and a 
 function guarded from all suspicion or suggestion of self- 
 seeking. " The Persians," says a careful student of their 
 manners, "strove for the ideal, — the great, noble, manly, 
 true; yet forgot not the practical world." ^ This is in 
 accordance with the views already stated ; contempt for 
 traffic is one thing, and contempt for toil is another. The 
 Persian noble was a laborer, as his faith enjoined ; but in 
 his day the connection of labor with the art of " doing 
 business " was not so palpable as it now is, while its reli- 
 gious meaning lay in its direct association with the earth, in 
 the toils of production, not of distribution. The Persians 
 were made for soldiers ; their ideal was of the heroic type, 
 and the arts they found congenial were those which fitted 
 them to master the world and prepare the way for vital civ- 
 ilizations. Such arts could culminate only in the culture 
 of such personal qualities as self-reliance, self-assertion, and 
 absolutism of will. In their noblest form, these qualities 
 became a lofty magnanimity, which knew how " to spare 
 
 ' Cyropeedia, i. 2. ^ A nabasis, i. 9. 
 
 * Herodotus, i. 153. * Strabo : De Situ Orb. xv. 
 
 ^ Rapp {Zeiisckr. d. Deuisch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xx. 128). 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 327 
 
 fallen enemies," to reject the death penalty for a single 
 offence, and to forbid even kings to treat their slaves with 
 harshness.^ 
 
 This self-respect, in so many ways characteristic of the 
 Persians, was to a great degree a form of pride. Here, for 
 the first time in human history, we find the sense of a really 
 historic function. The confluence and conflict of Asiatic 
 races had necessitated the appearance of a select tribe 
 capable of commanding these vast materials, whose fer- 
 ment was now heading towards a definite world-result. 
 The force must be in personal Will, not in mass nor even 
 in organization, — in will, conscious of right to rule, and in- 
 tensified both by self-indulgence and self-respect. In the 
 Persian genius for sway begins that worship of personality 
 which has been the shaping force for good and ill of 
 European civilization. 
 
 Its absolutism may be illustrated by the treatment of 
 woman. In Persia, far more than in India or China, she is 
 subject to the will of man. Here the harem reaches its 
 full development, and the eunuchs, or keepers of women, 
 are installed around it. Here seclusion was but little mod- 
 ified by custom or by circumstance. In the inscriptions 
 and sculptures woman is wholly ignored. One would not 
 know there was any sex but the male. What a record 
 of slavery is in that deportation by Darius of fifty thou- 
 sand women to populate Babylon, drawn like tributes of 
 food or cattle from the several provinces of the empire ! ^ 
 or in the custom of taking concubines with the army on 
 distant marches, in great numbers, and with luxurious at- 
 tendance, and leaving wives at home under close super- 
 vision ! ^ or in that story of the concubine, dressed in 
 splendid robes, who came to the Greek victors after Plataea, 
 
 ^ Herodotus, i. 137, 138 ; ix. 109. Gobineau, i. 403. 
 
 * Herodotus, iii. 159. 
 
 * See authorities in Rawlinson, Ancient Monarchies., iii- 238. Brisson, p. 549. 
 
328 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 and besought them to deliver her from the Persian lord 
 who had carried her off by violence and held her as a 
 slave ! ^ The Persian could marry his nearest kindred,^ and 
 the law imposed on him no such strict commandment of 
 chastity as the law of Manu enforced on the Hindu ; still 
 less did it resemble the sexual asceticism of the Buddhist. 
 The will of the Persian was his law ; and the story of the 
 seven nobles sent to the king of ]\Iacedonia to demand 
 earth and water, and who were all assassinated on account 
 of their indecent behavior at a banquet towards the wives 
 of their hosts, sounds all the more probable for being 
 related by Herodotus of the Persians.^ The demand of 
 these ruffians that the Macedonian women, contrary to the 
 custom of the land, should be brought out to sit with them 
 at table, shows that in their own country even the rule of 
 seclusion yielded to arbitrary will. The Biblical romance 
 of Esther, to the same effect, tells us of the queen of Aha- 
 suerus, that the king commanded her to appear before the 
 crowd at a feast, and that she refused to obey. Artaxerxes 
 was glad to have his queen Statira ride in an open chariot, 
 that the country w'omen might salute her; at the same 
 time no male must approach or pass her, upon penalty 
 of death.* 
 
 But, on the other hand, woman must have found her 
 account in the national respect for personality itself. A 
 son could not sit in his mother's presence without permis- 
 sion ; and if a king, he occupied at table a place lower than 
 hers. A law dating from Cyrus decreed that when the 
 king entered a city, every woman in it should receive a 
 piece of gold ; and this was done in honor of the women 
 who by their reproaches turned back his fleeing army in 
 the Median war.^ Cyrus, always the national ideal, had 
 but one wife, and at her death commanded that the whole 
 
 ' Herodotus, ix. 76. ^ Duncker, ii. 419. ^ Herodotus, v. iS-20. 
 
 * Plutarch: Artaxerxes, ^ Plutarch on the virtues of women. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 329 
 
 nation should go into mourning.^ His chivalrous treat- 
 ment of women is a leading feature of Xenophon's portrait, 
 and far surpasses anything of the kind in Greek manners. 
 The education of the Persians in childhood belonged to the 
 mother; and the crimes of Parysatis and Amestris prove 
 that their customs permitted the queen, as wife and as 
 mother, an almost absolute power in public and private 
 affairs. In the later times of the empire women were 
 made priestesses of Anaitis, or of the sun, and dedicated to 
 chastity. The honor paid by Cyrus to women, their names 
 given in the army-lists of Xerxes, and the constant refer- 
 ence to them as important political and social forces 
 throughout the histories of the Achaemenide kings, are 
 evidences of no slight recognition of female capacities 
 and rights.^ 
 
 In political as in domestic life, the ultimate appeal was 
 to arbitrary Will. The law of the Medes and Persians,^ 
 that could not be changed, was nothing else than the rigor 
 of the king's decree for the time being. Personal govern- 
 ment, as developed in modern times, except in its theolog- 
 ical form, is either limited by recognized laws and customs, 
 as even the autocracy of the Czar ; or checked by inter- 
 national relations, as that of the Sultan ; or obliged to make 
 appeal in some real or pretended way to the popular voice, 
 as that of the French emperor. In China it is controlled 
 by an immemorial ritual ; in India, by an equally imme- 
 morial religious tradition. But the later Persian autocrat 
 had the personal government of an omnipotent Will. 
 There was no precept of the Persian national religion 
 which he did not violate whenever he pleased ; no foreign 
 custom he did not adopt or reject as he preferred. It is 
 entirely impossible to reconcile the Zoroastrian law with 
 the history of any Achsemenide king. Cyrus punishes the 
 
 ' Herodotus, ii. i. . 
 
 2 Herodotus, vii. 61 ; Ctesias, /««/?«. Plutarch: Ariaxerxes. Justin, x. 2. 
 
 '■^ Daniel, vi 15. 
 
330 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 (sacred) water of the Gyndes for drowning his horse, and 
 Cambyses violates tombs and burns bodies. Cyrus is de- 
 terred from burning Croesus not by rehgious scruples, but 
 by sympathy and respect. Xerxes treats the Hellespont 
 with contempt. There is no record of the Avesta ritual 
 being performed by these kings, and their Magi were quite 
 other than the Avestan Athrava. They gave the Greeks 
 the impression which a sublime self-idolatry is wont to 
 make on nations, of a divine right to rule ; so that even 
 Xenophon wrote his "Institutions of Cyrus" in order to 
 show how the difficult problem of personal government 
 and popular consent might be solved, and the world be 
 ruled by one person whose character should cause all men 
 to desire to be governed by his opinions and will. 
 
 Our Greek authorities make the rise (Cyrus), organiza- 
 tion (Darius), and extension (Xerxes) of the empire pure 
 products of individual Will. Only the royal personality 
 holds together these loose principalities and tribes, its 
 "eyes and ears" being omnipresent; and the satraps, Tis- 
 saphernesandPharnabazus, by merely aping its desires and 
 doings in their own spheres, are able to direct the fortunes 
 of the free Greek States. It is the king's wisdom that 
 conquers nations, as with Cyrus ; the king's folly that loses 
 battles, as with Darius at Issus ; his iconoclastic rage that 
 tramples old religions under foot, as with Cambyses in 
 Egypt ; ^ his person whom the enemy in battle makes the 
 objective point, as when Cyrus the Younger made directly 
 for Artaxerxes, and Alexander for the tent of Darius. 
 Only one sin is known to the cuneiform records of nations 
 subdued and punished, — "They rebelled against me, the 
 king of kings, and deserved their fate at my hands." No 
 sense of presumption in all this, no suspicion of wrong- 
 doing, more than in the Hebrew Jahveh when he lifts up and 
 
 1 But see rirugsch Bey's Egyft under the Pharaohs, cliap. xix., where the stories of 
 Cambyses' rage against Apis, etc , are denied, from the monuments. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 33 1 
 
 casts down at his will. " I was not wicked," writes Darius, 
 proudly, " nor a tyrant, nor a liar; neither I, nor any of my 
 race. I have obeyed the laws ; and the rights and customs 
 I have not violated." ^ 
 
 We must not suppose that any Persian regarded this 
 supremacy as an arbitrary Will imposed from without. 
 The Hebrews were not the only " chosen nation." Every 
 Persian shared the " manifest destiny " of his king. The 
 king was the ideal. The fire was extinguished at his death. 
 This was a nation of kings, of gods. They alone, of all 
 subjects, paid no tribute to the throne. They were not 
 ground into powder, like Assyrian or Babylonian multi- 
 tudes at toil. Their chiefs associated with the king, rea- 
 soned and joked with him, gave him counsel, heard his 
 schemes with approval or doubt.^ But the rights of his 
 will they did not doubt. Even in Herodotus' story that 
 Cyrus persuaded them to join him in rebellion against the 
 Medes by setting them at hard work one day and feasting 
 them the next, to show them the difference between sub- 
 jection and freedom, the prince acts as one who knows that 
 he has authority to enforce their consent. Herodotus him- 
 self seems to have no other conception of him than as one 
 divinely made for ruling men.^ The boys at school elect 
 him king. Astyages sees by his manners that he is a king 
 in the disguise of a herdsman's child. He revolts against 
 Media with no other visible authority to seize the empire 
 than a spurious letter appointing him. general of the Persian 
 levies. His studious regard for feudal rights and personal 
 feelings is made by Xenophon to appear, as we have already 
 said, as a conscious policy of conceding liberties and lav- 
 ishing favors that men might feel free in an obedience that 
 flowed naturally from gratitude and love. And in after 
 
 1 Behistun, iv. 13. 
 
 ^ The old heroic legends of the native Iranian chronicles, preserved in Firdusi and 
 Hamza, make the relation of the king to his chiefs the same as we find it in Herodotus. 
 ^ Herodotus, v. 121. 
 
332 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 days, when the taste of power had become sweet to the 
 pampered lords of Persia, the "king of kings" takes care 
 to protect his supremacy by putting the provinces under 
 governors of native birth. ^ Alexander pursued the same 
 policy, and thereby offended Greek and Macedonian pride 
 of race and desire of exclusive power. 
 
 Historically, then, the beginning of respect for personal- 
 ity is in aristocratic institutions ; not in honor to an ideal 
 self, in which all may prospectively share, but in a kind of 
 worship for powers of will, great enough to distinguish 
 some persons above all others. In India, the ideal is in a 
 religious law, embodied in a hereditary priesthood. In 
 China, it is a labor-power embodied in a homogeneous 
 multitude. In Persia, it has become a strictly personal Will 
 embodied in an individual, a class, a tribe, who are capable 
 of showing its power. The early Persians chose their 
 bravest for king, and they never forgot the connection be- 
 tween authority and personal energy. Darius was himself, 
 like Cyrus, the choice of a body of revolting chiefs. 
 Although absolute over his satraps, he was satirized by 
 his nobles. " Cyrus ruled as a father, Cambyses as a mas- 
 ter, Darius as a trader." ^ Yet the administrative force of 
 this politic ruler was what made Persia an empire ; and 
 while his nobles were free to criticise, they failed not to 
 recognize the mighty constructive will that was felt alike at 
 the centre and circumference of his dominions, restraining, 
 balancing, harmonizing powers, and reconciling the intel- 
 lectual, social, and even religious differences of the tribes. 
 The mildest of conquerors, the mediator of nations, ex- 
 plorer of the continents, opener of the ways from sea to 
 sea,^ Darius stands, perhaps, the strongest justification in 
 history for the worship of personal Will.'^ The weakness 
 
 ' Goblneau, ii. 43. - Herodotus, iii. 89. ^ Ibid., iii. 135. 
 
 * It is the report of Diodorus that Darius was the only king who had been deified by the 
 Egyptians in his lifetime, and that they rendered him after his death the same honors which 
 they were wont to pay to their ancient kings. Diodorus, i. 95. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 333 
 
 of his successors could not stand the ideal test that Per- 
 sian freedom still knew how to apply ; and real power 
 passed gradually from their hands into those of overbear- 
 ing court favorites and satraps of energy and skill, and even 
 of Greek generals and refugees. 
 
 There is thus a very positive sense in which we can 
 speak of Persian freedom. Not a democratic sense of the 
 word, but one that meant rights and powers, and even 
 anticipated very important elements in Greek liberty, — 
 which was always more or less an appeal by the masses 
 to personal government by the strongest will, and on the 
 part of the more thoughtful minds, such as the Socratic 
 school, a protest against crude democracy as usurping the 
 political rights of the best and highest wills. Not more 
 pronounced was the Greek consciousness of manifest na- 
 tional destiny than that Persian sense of a great historic 
 function which every Persian noble shared with his king. 
 It ran in their blood, as in his, to make the world their 
 footstool. The proudest autocrat could not disregard this 
 community of faith and feeling, nor fail to consult it. 
 Xerxes, on the whole, despite a few terrible acts of power, 
 the most forgiving of kings, persuading his lords to make 
 war on Greece, says : " I only pursue the path appointed 
 me. From the beginning we Persians have never been at 
 rest: a deity impels us. I need not recount the conquests 
 of my predecessors. Sufficient to say, I am resolved to in- 
 vade Greece and punish Athens. But that I may not seem 
 to act arbitrarily, I commit the matter to your reflection, 
 allowing every one to speak with freedom."^ Influenced 
 by certain chiefs to give up the plan, he is again brought 
 to his first resolution by supernatural visions, which call 
 him to fulfil his destiny, and march to universal sway.^ 
 
 We have here the explanation o-f the remarkable fact 
 that the " Great King " was in many ways an ideal, politi- 
 
 1 Herodotus, vii. 8. ^ Ibid., vii. 19. 
 
334 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 cal and ethical as well as religious, to the Greek republics. 
 The germs of liberty in Persian life were quite sufficient to 
 overcome their reluctance to accept what would seem to 
 be directly contrary to the individualism of these warring 
 democracies. Not only were the literary representatives 
 of a citizenship that refused to prostrate itself before a 
 throne so fascinated by the " Great Barbarian " that his 
 institutions are the material of their Utopias, but the party 
 and personal strifes of Greek States are constantly referred 
 to him for settlement, and their exiles compete for his fav- 
 orable interference. This was not so much a tribute to his 
 wisdom or humanity (although the ethical contrast of king 
 and politician is usually by no means to the credit of the 
 latter) as it was a recognition of the necessity on the part 
 of a swarm of bitter partisans to take refuge from political 
 chaos in the grandeur of one omnipotent Will. The Greek 
 republics were nowhere based on a universal principle; the 
 liberty they pursued was the liberty to will and to do ; and 
 here was its ideal embodied, not in the personal centre of 
 the State alone, but in the prestige and pride of the chiefs 
 of families and clans. The majestic proportions of this 
 development of personal power; its day of judgment for 
 the weak empires of the East; its splendid illustration 
 of capacit}' in Cyrus and Darius, and of magnificence in 
 Xerxes ; the colossal growth that pointed back to sturdy 
 simplicity and self-control, and the consciousness of im- 
 mense educational obligations in art and science, — com- 
 bined to produce an effect on Greek imagination it would 
 not be going too far to call religious. Xenophon, who had 
 led his Ten Thousand on the most perilous march in all 
 antiquity, and who had fully learned the superiority of the 
 Greeks as soldiers to Persian levies and leaders, was not 
 a man to be dazzled or awed by a mere Eastern despot, 
 least of all by an Artaxerxes in the last stages of Persian 
 decline. Yet it is Xenophon who has paid the highest 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 335 
 
 possible tribute to Persian institutions. And Plato him- 
 self is scarcely behind him in the praises of these institu- 
 tions, and especially of the training of the kings, which he 
 puts into the mouth of Socrates, who contrasts them with 
 the moral and religious crudeness of Greek disciplines.^ 
 No deity could compare with Destiny for Hellenic rever- 
 ence. And the infection of the Persian's confidence in his 
 star greatly helped to bring about the extraordinary fact, 
 that Cyrus the barbarian became the politico-religious ideal 
 of the cultivated Greek. 
 
 This religious prestige, which gathered about Cyrus 
 from the first moment of his appearance on the historic 
 field, so rapidly covered his name with mythic honors, that 
 but few definite facts can be discerned through their haze. 
 The coming of a great man seems to dwarf history and 
 open the gates of imagination for the common mind. 
 Nature melts at his coming into poetry and legend, and 
 the world inherits a new meaning from the soul of man 
 with which it is slow to part. As late as the second cen- 
 tury of Christianity, Pausanias interrupts his praise of An- 
 toninus to say that in his opinion Cyrus was after all the 
 " father of mankind." 
 
 Greek testimony leaves us in doubt whether Cyrus was 
 Persian or Mede ; while a third theory made him both, 
 giving rise to the story that an oracle had warned Asty- 
 ages against the coming of a mule to the throne.^ This 
 notion of a mixed origin impressed itself on the Persian 
 heroic legend, as appears in the later Shah-Nameh, where 
 he is the son of an Iranian father and a Turanian mother; 
 and the Mahometan prose historians follow the tradi- 
 tion.^ His name has stood for the communion of races 
 and religions, the pride of each making him its conquest 
 and its crown. Both the Hebrew and the Mussulman 
 
 ^ First Alcibiades, 36, 37. - Description of Greece, viii. 43. 
 
 2 Mirkhond. 
 
336 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 tradition claim him as their convert. A Mahometan poem 
 of the twelfth century, working up earlier beliefs, derives 
 him from a female demon (dlv), gives him a hideous coun- 
 tenance and immense strength, in other words, makes him 
 a barbarian ; rescues him from exposure in the forests, and 
 educates him in Iran, where he recurs to barbarian faith 
 and habits, but recovers himself, conquers Turan, becomes 
 the saviour of his people and the master of the world. ^ 
 Then falling from grace, and exalting himself as God, he 
 is punished by rebellion, and converted to the true faith 
 and ethics by meeting a hermit in the forest, who humbles 
 his pride and teaches him the wisdom and might of Allah. 
 This, as the reader will observe, follows the usual dealing 
 of Semitic religions with the names of great heathens whom 
 they could not but respect. But it is also the ordinary 
 type of the old Iranian legend, as in Yima. In the same 
 way the older Shah-Nameh transports him and his paladins 
 to practise devotions among the holy mountains of Elburz, 
 making the old Iranian feudalism end in mystical piety. 
 And Mirkhond, who collected the Islamized traditions of 
 old Persian kings (fifteenth century), describes Kai-Khosrij, 
 by that time probably identified with Cyrus, as the bene- 
 factor of laborers and the saviour of his country, and 
 makes him at last a Sufi, who prays for release from self 
 and absorption into God, — "convinced," after a hundred 
 years of success in all his desires, that " this world is but 
 a mirage, and we the thirsty travellers " ! ^ 
 
 The infancy and growth of Cyrus, as treated by the my- 
 thologists, are of messianic type. The similarity of the 
 mythic forms by which national religions express the sense 
 of gratitude to an appointed deliverer, and of the bitter 
 resistance he meets from the evil he comes to overthrow, 
 is fully illustrated in the cycle of legends of Herodotus, 
 
 1 Kuschnamch, or History of Cyrus. See Gobineau : HUioire des Perses. 
 * Shea: Kings of Persia, p. 260. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 337 
 
 in the dream of Mandane prefiguring her son's glory, the 
 dream of Astyages that his throne was in peril from his 
 own grandson ; in his consulting the Magi, and command- 
 ing the death of the child ; in the escape of Cyrus through 
 the power of Destiny ; in the king's merciless revenge on 
 his counsellors and agents, and his discovery of the boy's 
 identity by the innate royalty of his behavior among his 
 playfellows and before the great men. These legends, and 
 those of his maturer life, of which Xenophon's romance is 
 also a variation, must have been very largely of Persian 
 rather than Greek origin. Their extension shows how 
 widely spread was the recognition of a vast and bene- 
 ficent change wrought by Cyrus in the west of Asia. 
 They are of great value as indicating the far higher civil- 
 ization introduced by the Persians in place of the Median. 
 Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between 
 their picture of Median despotism and barbarism, and that 
 which Xenophon has ventured to draw of the splendid 
 humanity and statesmanly policy of Cyrus. It points 
 strongly to a difference of race, and gives color to Oppert's 
 recent theory in explanation of the different lists of kings 
 in Herodotus and Ctesias, — that Median civilization was 
 Turanian. 
 
 The same ideal prestige ascribed to Cyrus that choice 
 wisdom of apologue, parable, and proverb which Hebrew 
 admiration ascribed to Solomon, and Christian to Jesus. 
 His symbolical appeal to the Persian nobles already men- 
 tioned ; animal legends, such as the letter sent to them 
 sewed up in a hare's belly, and the suckling of Cyrus by 
 a dog (an etymological myth) ; his parable of the piper 
 and the foolish fishes,^ told to the chiefs who had only 
 submitted to him when compelled ; and the maxims of 
 political and moral wisdom which are ascribed to him by 
 the Greeks, — that those who would not do good for 
 
 ' Herodotus, i. 141. 
 22 
 
23^ POLITICAL FORCES, 
 
 themselves should be obliged to do good for others, that 
 no one ought to govern who was not better than those he 
 governed, and that the Persians should not change their 
 rocky and rude country, because the seeds of plants and 
 the lives of men resemble the soil they inhabit ; ^ above 
 all, his relation with Croesus, of which we are about to 
 speak more fully, — all show the drift of gnomic and 
 oracular repute to this favorite of the gods. 
 
 As the hero of philosophical romance, Cyrus receives 
 in Xenophon's " Cyropasdia " the finest personal tribute of 
 the kind now mentioned in all antiquity. Here he acts 
 the part of an ethical and political saviour, coming into 
 the world with authority and insight to rectify all wrong. 
 He is the incarnation of " sweetness and light." He 
 shows this absolute function in rebuking Median luxury 
 and intemperance, even as a boy; in con\-eying reproof 
 and instruction to his chiefs by elaborate logic, practical 
 illustrations, aphorisms, and even cheerful raillery and 
 ready wit, and to soldiers, courtiers, sages, not only in a 
 constant didactic tone, like the Socrates of Plato or the 
 Jesus of the Gospels, but in a minute pedagogy, as if au- 
 thorized to create anew in every detail the administration 
 of society and law. He is more than teacher ; he is the 
 centre of teachers, who lay at his feet all the experience of 
 man, that in him it may be lifted to universal ends. All 
 that the Socratic Xenophon has imbibed from the best 
 society of the ancient world is not too much to be worked 
 up into the mere outfit for this inspired guide of mankind, 
 not in the theory and practice of the virtues only, but in 
 the most difficult functions of political and military life. 
 At the feet of his father, Cambyses, he listens respectfully 
 to maxims of faith and conduct Avhich have never been 
 surpassed, — that the gods act according to laws; that we 
 should pray only after striving to render ourselves such as 
 
 1 Plutarch : Apophthegms of Ki?igs. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 339 
 
 we ought and hope to be, holding it impious to ask tlie 
 gods for gifts we do not struggle to earn ; that there is no 
 way of appearing wise so certain as to be wise ; that the 
 commander's care of his army should be of a nobler sort 
 than merely to keep physicians to cure their diseases, even 
 the wisdom to prevent their falling sick ; that by perfect 
 sympathy he should win their confidence and love, — to 
 which ends hosts of practical maxims are supplied.^ How 
 humbly he accepts the paternal admonition never to use 
 the Persians for his own interest alone ! How respectfully 
 he listens to the Lydian king, till the day of his falling into 
 his own power the wisest and greatest of earthly kings,^ ever 
 consulting his prudence and tact, and moved to tenderness 
 by his sufferings ; learning from his downfall the instability 
 of success ; requiting his noble confession of insufficiency 
 to contend against the greater one whom Destiny had pro- 
 vided by the generous restoration of his family and goods ! ^ 
 How he caps these lessons of human pride and failure with 
 the royal philosophy, that happiest is the man who can 
 earn most through justice, and use most with honor ! * By 
 what choice disciples he is surrounded ! Tigranes thrills 
 his soul by describing the sage (a reminiscence of Socrates) 
 who forgives his king for condemning him to death " since 
 he knows not what he does." ^ Chrysantas delights to dis- 
 cern in him the proofs that a good prince can be a good 
 father of his people, and only adds to his master's ethics of 
 rational obedience that reason which his own modesty had 
 not emphasized, — :the right of one to claim it whose fit- 
 ness to lead men to their own best good was past all 
 doubt.*^ Gobryas praises his simple and hardy habits; and 
 having committed a beautiful daughter to his care, is re- 
 warded by his assurance that to enjoy such confidence is 
 a more precious treasure in his sight than all the wealth 
 
 1 Xenophnn : Cyropcrdia, i. 6. ^ Ibid., viii. 2. ^ Ibid., vii. 2. 
 
 * Ibid., viii. 2. ^ Ibid., iii i. " Ibid., viii. i. 
 
340 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 of Babylon.^ Pheraulas, whose courage to withstand the 
 temptations of riches, and to exchange their burdens for 
 independence with poverty, finds an appreciative king.^ 
 And both father and mother warn him to govern, unhke the 
 Median kings, by obeying the laws, and never to imagine 
 that one man ought to possess more than all others.^ 
 He believes that even the worst men will think it a ser- 
 vice to themselves that the best should have the leading of 
 them.* He holds everything noble or beautiful possessed 
 by his subjects to be an ornament to himself He rejects 
 great presents, even those of gratitude, saying, " You shall 
 not make me such a man as will run up and down, barter- 
 ing my services for money." He " lays up resources by 
 means of his conduct."'^ He treats women with noble 
 delicacy and deep respect,*" and his advice to young men 
 on matters of lov^e are mingled with genial humor. He 
 opens battle with prayer: "They who fear the gods in 
 peril, are all the less afraid of men." " He creates not 
 only a perfect commissariat and perfect discipline, but an 
 esprit de corps. He disparages excited appeals to sol- 
 diers, as compared with the systematic culture of valor 
 and virtue. He conducts war with unheard-of mildness, 
 dismissing prisoners, forgiving foes, slaying only those in 
 arms, leaving the nations free from exactions and service. 
 He frees slaves and makes them soldiers.^ He pities 
 heroic men in defeat and fighting hopelessly, and even 
 draws oft" his conquering army to preserve their lives.^ 
 He treats his allies with great delicacy, deferring the din- 
 ner-hour for himself and his army till their arrival, as well 
 as all partition of booty, and doing nothing without regard 
 to their feelings. He wins all hearts not only by nobility 
 
 ' Xenophon; Cyropoedia, v. 2, 3. 2 ibid., viii. 3. 
 
 ' Ibid., i. 3; viii. 5. < Ibid.,ii. 2. 
 
 '' Ibid., iii. 12. 6 See dying address to his sons. 
 
 ' Xenophon : Cyroptzdia, iii. 3. 8 ibid., iv. 4, 6. 
 
 8 Ibid., vii. I. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 341 
 
 and kindness, but also by tact, overcoming in this way the 
 jealousy of Cyaxares the Median king, whom he super- 
 sedes in the love of the army, and who finds himself re- 
 duced to a cipher by the man he has made general of his 
 troops.^ He takes up the cause of laboring men, sees that 
 the agricultural populations are well cared for, and praises 
 the lot of those who live by honest toil. He enforces di- 
 vision of labor. He lays down wise principles of production 
 and distribution, and living use of capital, and prescribes 
 due order in all administration, makes litigants go to ref- 
 erees, raises the' best to power without distinction of rank, 
 sends judges through his States to rectify disorders, and 
 opens postal roads and stations for swift couriers. He 
 honors the fine arts, and spares Sardis on their account. 
 For himself, he is better pleased to give than to receive, 
 and leads others by force of example to virtue. He is 
 husband of one wife, and thoroughly loyal to his vows. 
 He excels not so much in military conduct as in love of 
 man, and dies grateful for a life of perfect success, ex- 
 horting his children to love each other, to believe in im- 
 mortality, and next to the gods to seek the good of all 
 mankind. He enjoins that no splendor be seen about his 
 remains, which must be as speedily as possible returned to 
 earth. 
 
 This noble ideal is marred by the limitations of its framer 
 and the conditions of the age. Xenophon's Cyrus, assum- 
 ing the necessity of willing obedience to a good-willing 
 power from those who have been used to servitude or must 
 be held to it, attempts to reconcile these conditions by a 
 training which presumes them all, and treats the subjects of 
 it with the tenderness of a father for his children, while de- 
 priving them of the right of bearing arms and disqualifying 
 them from even desiring the means of freedom.^ This is 
 
 * Xenophon : Cyropcedia, v. 4, 5 ; vii. 4 ; viii. 3. 
 2 Ibid., viii. 1-8. 
 
342 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 a piece of Xenophon's Spartan prejudices, quickened to a 
 sense of the duties involved in it for one of such humanity 
 as Cyrus. It was probably in accordance with the observed 
 customs of the Persians of his day, that Xenophon, for the 
 same purpose of securing authority to the world-rulers, 
 makes Cyrus advise his countrymen to wear high shoes to 
 appear taller than they were, and to paint their faces to 
 give them beauty and dignity.^ His statement that the 
 "adoration" he reports Cyrus to have received for the first 
 time from the Persians on his state-procession from the 
 palace in Babylon, as the spontaneous tribute of his peo- 
 ple, should have been allowed him by the cultured Greeks 
 (they certainly refused it to the later Achaemcnidan kings), 
 is only to be explained by his sense of a special divine 
 authority in Cyrus to receive the world's worship as the 
 " Star in the East" of a religious faith. How natural it was 
 to form this personal theory of the origin of the Persian 
 custom appears in the later deification of Jesus, even in his 
 infancy, when Christianity had become a religious power, 
 and needed verification of its claims in the history of its 
 founder. The personal character of Xenophon's admira- 
 tion of Persian royalty is shared by Plato, who makes his 
 Athenian guest in " The Laws " praise Cyrus and his men 
 for moderation in the exercise of power, sharing their free- 
 dom with others, and leading them to equality; the mag- 
 nanimous king "granting liberty of speech to all who were 
 able to advise," so that " progress was effected through 
 freedom, friendship, and communion of intellect." Plato's 
 criticism of Cyrus is confined to ascribing the decay of the 
 State to the custom introduced by him of intrusting the 
 education of princes to women, whose petting made them 
 vicious, — as in the case of Cyrus' own children.^ 
 
 We shall do justice to the significance of these Greek 
 tributes when we consider that they are traceable directly 
 
 ^ Xenophon : Cyro/icedia^ vi;i. 1-3. ^ Laws, bk. iii. 
 
PABVLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 343 
 
 to the very highest moral and intellectual authority in 
 ancient history. The teaching of Socrates produced two 
 fruits in philosophical romance, — the Atlantis of Plato, 
 and the "Cyropaedia" of Xenophon. The description 
 of the early inhabitants of the great Atlantic Island, — 
 of the rise of their vast empire through their frugality 
 and sobriety, their gentleness and wisdom, their piety 
 and humanity, and their willing obedience to divine kings; 
 of their gradual corruption through luxury, and of the valor 
 with which the Athenians met their immense invading hosts, 
 till both nations were destroyed by earthquake and flood 
 ten thousand years before, — can have been suggested 
 only by the history of the rise and fall of the Great 
 Empire of tlie East, and its relations with Athens in 
 recent times. ^ It grew confessedly out of the same desire 
 to illustrate the ideal Socratic State, with Xenophon's " Cy- 
 ropsedia ; " although in this case not Persia, but a primeval 
 Athens is the central figure, while the perfection of Atlan- 
 tis also is, like Persian virtues, concentrated in her earliest 
 royalty. Xenophon wrote his " Cyropaedia" to illustrate the 
 philosophical principle of free government, as consisting in 
 the willing obedience of men to what they recognized as 
 just and humane, as he wrote his " Hiero the Despot" to 
 show the converse of the same principle, — that unwill- 
 ing obedience is slavery and ruin. In his praise of the 
 aristocratic side of Cyrus' institutes, we see the Socratic 
 dislike of extreme democracy as it existed in Greece. 
 Cyrus is himself a pure disciple of Socrates in his con- 
 stant presumption that all men desired to do right and to 
 be rightly governed, in his identification of politics with 
 ethics, in his cardinal principles of temperance, justice, 
 courage, and love, in respecting the religions of all nations ; 
 and while not hesitating to join in their rites, yet dispens- 
 ing with diviners, and obeying the inward voice, making 
 
 ' Jowett's Translation of Timeeus, 19; Critias, 109-120. 
 
344 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 humbleness and noble endeavor his true prayer, because 
 the gods could act only by laws, never by caprice.^ His 
 doctrine of forgiveness, and his death, looking forward to a 
 future life, are both Socratic. It is true that Socrates would 
 not have approved the suicide of Panthea upon the death 
 of her husband ; but this event is but an incident of the 
 most tender and touching story of mutual love, honor, and 
 fidelity between the sexes in all ancient fiction, and is so 
 related as to show Cyrus in the noblest light. It is safe to 
 say that no tribute so exalted was ever paid to any people, 
 when the position and character of those who paid it are 
 fully weighed, as those of Plato and Xenophon to the foun- 
 ders of the Persian State. It becomes the more striking 
 when we consider that the tribute of the latter especially 
 was almost wholly to fcrso/uil g-over/imeu^, in a high sense of 
 . the word, as a righteous resort from the excesses of Greek 
 democracy or ochlocracy. And here we must note Xeno- 
 phon's purpose to present the practical as well as philo- 
 sophical ideal of sovereignty. He was in most respects one 
 of the clearest heads in all antiquity on matters of political 
 and military science. And we may well ask what a name 
 must C}'rus have left behind him, when we find such a man 
 ascribing to him almost every great economical principle 
 or measure by which later monarchies ha\'e combined their 
 own preservation with the prosperity of their subjects ! 
 At the same time, the condition of the ancient world was 
 thoroughly recognized, from the best Greek experience, as 
 needing above all things the remedy of personal govern- 
 ment righteously applied. From this should issue a sys- 
 tematic moral training in ideals suitable to free men, 
 combined, as in the Spartan discipline, with contempt for 
 the mere pursuit of wealth. The king must carry the 
 force of personal example into immediate contact with his 
 subjects. Hence every one must come to the palace to 
 
 1 Xenophon: Cyyopcedia, i. 6. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 345 
 
 prove his loyalty, the rich must not live away from the 
 capital, a standing army must take the place of uncertain 
 feudal services,^ the best people must dine at the king's 
 table, administration must be watched by secret police, the 
 civil and military powers be vested in distinct persons,^ and 
 offices be rightly and gifts generously bestowed. The king 
 must be the moral ideal,^ and rule by incessant toil and 
 vigilant foresight, as one personally responsible for the 
 welfare of his people, with a " thirst for doing good," and 
 for winning obedience through love.^ 
 
 We have thus presented Xenophon's ideal Cyrus in full, 
 not because of its historical truth, which is probably much 
 inferior to the story of Herodotus, nor as unaware that this 
 is the wisdom of Greece rather than of Persia ; but because 
 the power of Cyrus' name to draw it out from such a 
 source, is mark of a position in the ancient world which 
 deserves the most profound regard. 
 
 To the Greek mind, to the simplicity of Herodotus no 
 less than to the philosophy and ethics of the Socratic 
 school, Cyrus was the child of Destiny, as he wa^ of Provi- 
 dential purpose to the Hebrew, — to the one as a grand 
 personal force transforming human society and politics; to 
 the other as the instrument of Jahveh to restore and exalt 
 his chosen race. The story of Crcesus is constructed in 
 the interest of this belief. In his relations with the king of 
 Lydia, this Son of Destiny, raised from the depths of the 
 far East, at once recognizes the existing moral and intel- 
 lectual achievements of mankind, and proves his own 
 superiority to the will of the gods of Asia and of Greece. 
 In this view I think I can hardly be mistaken. Croesus 
 for the Greeks, especially the lonians, is king of the typical 
 tribe in Asiatic civilization, and conqueror of the most ad- 
 vanced Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Lydians had the 
 
 ^ Xenophon : Cyropcedia, ii. i. * Ibid., viii. 6. 
 
 = Ibid., i. 6. * Ibid., V. i. 
 
346 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 prestige of political wisdom and social resource ; they were 
 the first employers of gold and silver coin, the first retailers 
 of goods ; they had the wit to invent games, as diversion 
 from suffering in a long and grievous famine.^ Croesus' 
 resources were fabulous, his conquests vast, his wisdom 
 proverbial alike for shrewdness and breadth. His capital 
 was the resort of Greek sages, the mother and nurse of 
 Greek literature. So great was his interest in Hellenic 
 culture, that he sent splendid gifts to the temples, con- 
 sulted the oracles, testing their knowledge, and followed 
 the guidance of Apollo in making war on Persia. He was 
 the common ally and honored friend of Babylon, Egypt, 
 Greece. Nothing could exceed the contempt of his wise 
 men for the rude hosts of Iran. On the funeral pyre he 
 calls upon Solon, as the one sage who could comprehend 
 his downfall and despair. In the Greek worship of Cyrus, 
 Croesus holds a place similar to that of the Magi in the 
 Christian legend of the destined Christ. It was this great 
 historical figure that naturally expressed the failure of all 
 existing wisdom, power, and even faith, before the advent 
 of the new Sun rising in the East, — an event which might 
 well stir the Greek world to serious thought. Conquered 
 by Cyrus and cast on the funeral pile (probably, as Hero- 
 dotus intimates,^ and as may be inferred from Xenophon, 
 without intention to carry out the barbarity, since it was 
 wholly contrary to the spirit of Cyrus to do so), he ac- 
 knowledges this decree of Destiny, — reproaching the 
 Pythian oracle with urging him on by delusions to war 
 against one whom none can withstand. Apollo can send 
 rain to put out the fires; but even he cannot turn back 
 the destiny of Cyrus to supersede both Lydian and Greek. 
 Permitted to send a message to the Delphian god to ask if 
 he is not ashamed of his doings, and if the gods of Greece 
 
 ^ Herodotus, i. 94. 
 
 2 Ibid., i. 86, 88. See Rawlinson, note A. to Herodotus, bk. i. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 347 
 
 were usually ungrateful, Croesus receives for answer that it 
 was not in Apollo to contravene the decrees of Fate. The 
 Greek Prometheus is illumined by suffering to foresee the 
 coming of Destiny to release him, and overthrow the exist- 
 ino- gods in the interest of man. Here it is not a defiant 
 Titan that throws himself on the deliverance to come, but 
 a conquered religion, confessing its day to be passed in 
 presence of the actual destined deliverer. Is it fanciful to 
 find this hinted in the smile with which Cyrus grants to 
 Crcesus permission to reproach the oracle instead of re- 
 buking him, as a loyal Greek would have done, for the _ 
 impiety of the thought? 
 
 Moreover, it is in recognizing what is noble in the older 
 beliefs and their confessors, that the new becomes noble 
 and free. Whether intending or not to burn Croesus, 
 Cyrus is moved to tenderness by the self-humiliation of' 
 the noble victim and his piety in view of death, reflecting 
 that he also is a man, and must meet the changes of for- 
 tune and the retribution of just laws. The man of Destiny 
 must respect morality, and learn its sovereignty over all 
 human things. The supernatural must be under the same 
 rule. The miracle of rain which protects Croesus, helps 
 also to convince Cyrus that his captive deserves human as 
 w^ell as Divine care.^ The wisdom of the past fails not to 
 serve the noble purposes of the new epoch and the higher 
 fate. Cyrus consults Croesus in important matters, listens 
 to his maxims practical and prudential, his reflections on 
 the instability of things. None the less is it always as 
 master of the occasion that he listens and accepts them. 
 The central force of the teaching is in his own personal 
 character and will. 
 
 The ideal personality of Cyrus, thus depicted by the im- 
 agination of the ages which followed his career, points, as 
 few historical ideals do, to an actual force in some degree 
 
 1 Herodotus, i. 87. 
 
348 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 correspondent to its supposed efifect. As founder of the 
 great empire which directed Greek history, even when 
 wasted on the field, and as restorer of the Jews to their 
 native land, carrying with them the faith and culture which 
 have made them so large a factor in modern civilization, he 
 is in many important respects the most impressive figure 
 of ancient times, and a root whence the world's progress 
 springs. Mr. Grote says that " while the conquests of 
 Cyrus contributed to assimilate the distinct types of civil- 
 ization in Western Asia, — not by elevating the worse, 
 but by degrading the better, — upon the native Persians 
 themselves they operated as an extraordinary stimulus, 
 provoking alike their pride, ambition, cupidity, and war- 
 like propensities." ^ This judgment seems to me to over- 
 look both the historical conditions and the character of 
 the great Persian's work. I must regard it as a very im- 
 perfect estimate of the influence of that large relation to 
 the ancient world to which Cyrus introduced his people; 
 but it is still more unjust to Cyrus himself. He was not a 
 reconstructor of nations only, but a reformer of the bar- 
 barous methods of Asiatic warfare. All traditions picture 
 him as of singular humanity in the treatment of conquered 
 nations. Most constructions of this kind in later ages pass 
 over the other Achaemenides, — not only the feeble Darius 
 Codomannus, the sensual Artaxerxes II., the cruel Ochus, 
 the voluptuous Xerxes, but Darius the great organizer, and 
 Cambyses the iconoclast, — pass over the immense influence 
 on foreign States exercised by the gifts and gold of Arta- 
 xerxes I., to rest on the person of Cyrus. Down to the 
 latest days of Persian nationality, as we have seen, this 
 precedence lasts, in the poets and historians of Islam. In 
 Cyrus only they find the " father " of nations ; he only 
 thinks himself adorned in adorning others ; he only strives 
 to heal discord, to reward noble conduct, to win the hearts 
 
 1 Grote : History of Greece, iv. 216. 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 349 
 
 of men by generous appreciation of merit, by forgiveness 
 of injuries, by tender consideration of the weaknesses and 
 wants of others. He is as pure in life as he is powerful in 
 arms ; has the majesty of human omnipotence with none 
 of its caprice ; would fain unite autocracy of power with 
 democracy of spirit; is at once ideal ruler and ideal man. 
 It is scarcely rational to suppose that all this testimony to 
 one so conspicuous in history as the creator of the Persian' 
 empire, so known to Babylon, Egypt, and Greece, can be 
 without historical guarantees ; that a repute which all the 
 admitted degeneracy of the Persian kings and people since 
 his day could not cover up from the sharpest eyes and 
 finest minds of that Athenian people, to whom the name 
 of barbarian was an offence, can be a baseless fiction. 
 
 As we have already said, that but for the preparatory 
 work of the " great kings " Alexander would not have 
 found Asia open to his unifying march ; that the con- 
 sciousness of a common empire, and the demand for a 
 common political administration did far more than the 
 little troop of fifty thousand with which he penetrated 
 Asia, to effect the conquest of the multitudinous tribes, — 
 so we may now add that the powerful initiation of these 
 influences must be ascribed to " Cyrus the Great." As it 
 is greater to create than to organize, he eclipses even Da- 
 rius, without whom the empire would have perished in a 
 day. A single sentence will perhaps express the direct 
 bearing of his life upon the Alexandrine campaigns. No 
 mere helplessness of a disorganized State, no weakness of 
 Oriental nerve, no absence of leaders, no over-confidence 
 of Darius II., did so much to effect their amazing success 
 as the previous preparation of the people of Asia to accept 
 the personal government of one who deserved to hold 
 sway ; the sense of community in an expectation of world- 
 purpose and destiny with which Cyrus and his conquering 
 Persians had at once inspired the East. Erom his day 
 
350 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Iran meant no more a vast desert of warring hordes, but 
 the Persia of the Great King, the chosen Solar Fire of 
 the World. The savage warfare of Iran and Turan gave 
 place to an empire making firm stand against incursions 
 from the Northern wilds. The feudal chiefs of Iran were 
 subordinated to the throne, without loss of freedom or 
 self-respect; and the conquest of Ionia opened the civiliza- 
 tion of the East and of the West to each other. From his 
 constructive conquests dates not the first but the most 
 radical intermixture of races, whence grew the breadth of 
 European experience. He raised the barrier to the North- 
 ern swarms whose mastery of Persia would have swept back 
 Aryan civilization, delayed for centuries Aryan immigra- 
 tion into Europe and the Germanic conquests with their 
 vast results to freedom and science, and so altered the 
 whole course of history. Rome herself, broadened by her 
 Parthian and Sassanide wars, and stirred by Persian passion 
 out of her narrow and hard materialism, showed in the 
 humanities of her later legislation that she had felt the 
 pressure of Cyrus' heroic hand. Hebrew psalmody, He- 
 brew law, the piety of Jahvism, as the mother of Christian 
 trust and love, born and nurtured in the exile, reached its 
 height in the exaltation of Cyrus, the " Righteous One 
 whom Jahveh loveth," the " Messiah," the " Anointed Sa- 
 viour of the World." No other messiah has the Hebrew 
 found but this one, for whom the girdle of the loins of 
 kings was loosed, that he might open the prison gates; 
 at whose touch the wilderness and the solitary place were 
 made glad, a highway was opened for the ransomed of 
 Jahveh, and the deserts of Judea rejoiced and blossomed 
 as the rose. To be the inspirer of the later Isaiah was to 
 hold a place second to none in the sources of Hebrew and 
 Christian faith. His capture of Babylon broke the pride 
 of Semitic polytheism. His restoration of the Jews effaced 
 at a word the hostilities of races and creeds, and gave the 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 351 
 
 first Strong impulse to universal religion, to the brother- 
 hood of nations and of times. The victories of Cyrus 
 were indeed the sunrise in the east. The turning of the 
 river that rolled through Babylon was the original of that 
 wonderful picture of a great Deliverer which Christian- 
 ity has made Jesus claim as meant for himself,^ — the 
 turning-point of ancient history. The same hand which 
 smote down the old gods of Asia, set up the coming God 
 of Europe. To the feet of this great Master of Nations 
 converge the lines of religious movement as we trace them 
 backward from their widest expansion in modern times. 
 And while studying the manifold bearings of his life on 
 succeeding ages, I am scarcely surprised that a brilliant 
 French historian, whose ingenious conclusions concerning 
 the Persians, however imperfectly sustained in some re- 
 spects, are highly worthy of consideration, should say 
 emphatically that " there is nothing else of so intense an 
 interest in all human history; "^ and that without him 
 " the Europe of to-day never would have existed." 
 
 We pause before this magnificent landmark of progress. 
 Let us reflect that we see the forerunner and type of that 
 principle which, for good and for evil, has controlled the 
 great religions of modern times. A man stands in the 
 place of God. It is not meant that the man is here held 
 to be God, though this is the tendency; and both in earlier 
 and later Iranian phases of monarchy the monarch often 
 assumes the name and worship of the god. The Persian 
 did not zvorship his king, certainly not in the days of Cyrus. 
 He was forbidden by his religious law even to make images 
 of Ormuzd, an invisible god. He made only symbolic 
 signs of deity hovering over the king. But these were 
 signs of personal Will, the essence of sovereignty alike 
 in God and king. Though the king was not God to the 
 Persian, then, he was the image of God, — an image if not 
 
 ' Isaiah, Ixi. i ; Luke, iv. 16-21. ^ Gobineau : Histoire des Perscs, i. 511. 
 
352 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 made with hands, yet representing in human form the au- 
 thority of that Will of whose human and divine elements 
 — choice of chiefs, and commandment of God — he was 
 the combined result. Later times and religions show how 
 naturally the personal God himself becomes identified 
 with the man specially made in his image. Though for 
 the Persian the reality of Ormuzd soars over the head of 
 the Achasmenide, yet a man stands in the place of God. It 
 is the form of a Person that we discern dimly through the 
 shadows of the past, and the ancient world is at his feet. 
 It is the sovereignty of a will. But this will worships ; 
 it recognizes moral laws, and obeys the spirit of love ; 
 it desires to command a willing obedience, to win the 
 hearts of men, to reconcile and succor them ; it knows that 
 its rights involve duties ; it treats the tribes of a continent 
 as one race, which needs and wishes to be governed, but 
 has the right to be governed well. And we thus discern 
 the justification in its own day and for those conditions in 
 which it was born — for the true birthday was in the Persia 
 of the great Cyrus — of the principle of Personal Govern- 
 ment ; a principle which more than two thousand years of 
 political and religious history were to develop and work 
 through, until it now finds its value in having prepared 
 the way for a higher stage of progress no longer to be 
 delayed. 
 
 Such is the Cyropaedia of real history, holding in its 
 bosom an end and purpose beyond the " great kings," an- 
 cient and modern, beyond the Messiahs, the Prophets of 
 Jahveh and of Allah, the authoritative Incarnations, the 
 theological types of Personal Government, of whom it is 
 made up, and whose sway, both ideal and actual, but fore- 
 shadows a real unity of man with God above and beneath 
 these limitations by exclusive types of personal Will. It is 
 in Cyrus that we see its fine foreshadowing in its largest 
 prophetic aspect. Not the " bright altars " of a Hebrew 
 
BABYLON, CYRUS, PERSIA. 353 
 
 Jahvch, but the altarless presence and fane of a human 
 potentate standing for justice and mercy, are " thronged 
 with prostrate kings." 
 
 " See barbarous nations at thy gates attend, 
 Walk in thy light, and in thy temple bend ! " 
 
 23 
 
II. 
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 
 
 •■\T 7HEN Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Achae- 
 ^ ' menidan dynasty at a blow, he not only assumed the 
 style and embraced the system of the native rulers, but 
 became at once the national ideal. Greece denounced 
 him as the destroyer of her liberties, the arrogant restorer 
 of her twenty thousand political convicts from exile.-' 
 Persia, on the contrary, hailed him as her deliverer from 
 national disintegration and dynastic decay. Plutarch re- 
 lates that Darius himself exchanged his contempt of the 
 stripling who sought to snatch his crown, for a recogni- 
 tion which went so far as to pray that if it went ill with 
 himself, the gods would "suffer none but Alexander to pos- 
 sess the throne of Cyrus ; " and adds : " So true is it, that 
 virtue is the victor still." ^ Only an overmastering per- 
 sonality could hold the numerous principalities of Iran 
 under a common sway; and this inflexible requirement of 
 their nature and traditions could find nothing but its own 
 irony in the later Acha;menidan kings. But when this 
 young hero, fresh from the conquest of Greece and Egypt, 
 threw himself single-handed, with the assurance of a god 
 and as a retributive fate, upon the vast empire of the " king 
 of kings," the thunder of his tread, the most rapid and re- 
 sistless in the history of war, awoke the old Iranian loyalty 
 to personal Will, with its glorious traditions ; and the 
 prestige of Cyrus and of Rustem, of the historical and the 
 mythological ideals alike, gathered about his head. A 
 million spears were grounded at the lifting of his arm. 
 The Gordian knot flies apart at the touch of his sword; 
 
 ^ Grote, x;i. 306. - Fortune or I'irtiie of Alexander, ii. 6, 7. 
 
358 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 he needs not untie it to prove himself the master for whom 
 its mystery waits. From his first defiance of Darius, de- 
 scribed in the legend^ as a refusal of the accustomed tribute 
 of golden eggs, because " the vital bird of him who sent 
 the eggs has deserted the cage of the body," or as the 
 return of a bitter herb for the bat and ball sent by that 
 monarch to satirize his youth,^ through the successive cap- 
 ture of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana, the subjuga- 
 tion of eastern Iran, the Bactrian and Southern campaigns, 
 to the coronation and apotheosis at Babylon, — every step 
 in that marvellous march was almost as much an ovation 
 as a struggle. The magnificent record of heroic toils and 
 pains which his Greek eulogist brings to prove him inde- 
 pendent of the favors of fortune,^ has its counterpart in the 
 ardor of submission, as to an expected one, which greeted 
 his coming as soon as the quality of the man was felt.'* 
 The L}-dian confederacy welcomed him. Babylon and 
 Susa threw open their gates to receive him. Tribe after 
 tribe gave in their adhesion. "After the battle of Arbela," 
 says Plutarch, " Alexander was acknowledged king of all 
 Asia."^ This expectancy is indeed an element needed to 
 explain the unparalleled success of a handful of Macedo- 
 nian soldiers. No great effects in political or religious 
 reconstructions are explicable without such conditions 
 precedent. The first resistance was made by Darius with 
 vast resources. But after the first blows the empire could 
 never be rallied, and there remained only outbreaks of in- 
 dividual States, jealous of their local liberties. The power 
 of Alexander's prestige was made cumulative by events ; 
 and the fact is worth emphasizing, that no great rebellion 
 of conquered tribes occurred in his campaigns, save that 
 
 ' Shea : Mirkhond, pp. 361, 362. ^ Ibid. 
 
 5 Plutarch: Fortutie or Virtue 0/ Alexatider, ii. 8-13. 
 
 * Arrian : Expedition of Alexander, iii. 17, 23, 28; iv. i, 15. Curtius, v. i, 2. Arrian, 
 i. 25 ; ii. 13. 
 
 5 Arrian, /iajj/wi. Plutarch: Life of Alexander. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 
 
 of the Bactrians, which was caused by the propagation of 
 a false story that Alexander intended to seize and put to 
 death all the leading men.^ 
 
 When the Iranian tribes saw the one general who could 
 have resisted him, Memnon of Rhodes, die before striking 
 a blow ; when they saw their king Darius ignobly seeking 
 safety in flight from the field of Issus, and the conqueror 
 enhancing a noble behavior towards his captive family by 
 punishing his assassins ; when they saw the conqueror rush 
 like a tempest across Central Asia to destroy the Bactrian 
 rival who had thought to rise to empire by the murder of 
 his king; when satrap after satrap tried his hand at re- 
 bellion in vain ; when every hour proved the tremendous 
 capabilities of a will which suppressed the conspiracies 
 of generals, shamed away the reluctance of soldiers, and 
 broke into ungovernable wrath at the very suspicion of 
 disloyalty in a friend ; when he dared to offend his own 
 followers by committing the satrapies to native chiefs ; 
 when he left the States their own institutions and free- 
 dom of worship ; when he took counsel of the Chaldean 
 Magi, rebuilt the fallen shrines of Babylon, restored the 
 abandoned tomb of Cyrus, and espoused the daughters of 
 native kings, — we cannot wonder that the national dislike 
 of an invader should be absorbed in admiration for one, 
 even though a Greek in speech, and plainly purposing 
 to play the part of a god, on whom rested so visibly the 
 tokens of the right to rule. No wonder native volunteers 
 crowded forward to garrison his conquered towns. No 
 wonder that when his army refused to follow him farther, 
 he found such a host of native youth rise ready to his hand 
 that the legions were roused to new zeal, and his march to 
 India showed miscellaneous hordes of Persians trained in 
 the disciplines of the Greek.^ No wonder cities sprang 
 
 ^ Williams: Ltye of A /exander(¥ ami\y L\hr:iry^. Arrian, iv. i. 
 ^ Spiegel: Eran. Alterth., ii. 562. 
 
360 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 up as by magic on navigable streams and in the desert, as 
 if a new birth had come over the whole land. No wonder 
 that the sympathies of races could be fertilized by inter- 
 marriage on the largest scale, beginning with his own ex- 
 ample and followed by eighty of his chiefs. No wonder that 
 the hordes of the ancient monarchy found free circulation 
 to revive enterprise and trade, and that this intercourse of 
 races opened with electric speed into the nobler commerce 
 of ideas and faiths. But these effects, which seemed su- 
 pernatural to historians and philosophers for many ages 
 after his day, were as largely due to the supreme command 
 always exercised over Iranian thought and conduct by 
 idealizations of personal Will, as to the actual qualities of 
 Alexander's genius. It is plain that these qualities would 
 have had but little power to move the world, but for the 
 immense leverage afforded by the other. 
 
 The pupil of Aristotle, the reader of Homer by day and 
 night, the preserver of Pindar's house from the sacking of 
 Thebes; whose camp^ was a lyceum of philosophy and 
 science, a school of historians and poets as well as of gen- 
 erals; the enthusiast for a civilization that should embrace 
 and unify the world, aspiring to teach humanities to the 
 rudest tribes, and Greek order and law to the jealous feudal 
 lords of Asia, and " by mixing lives, manners, customs, 
 wedlocks, as in a festival goblet, to make e\ ery one take the 
 whole habitable world for a country, of which his camp 
 and army should be the metropolis," — this man, without 
 looking too closely at the strange mixture of dispositions 
 and motives, or at the uncertainty of tradition which besets 
 a true estimate of Alexander's life, was indeed the higher 
 ideal for which Nineveh, Babylon, Mede, and Persian had 
 educated the races of Iran, Again the native genius finds 
 its living symbol ; nerve-fire condensed into personality, 
 
 ^ Pyrrho the sceptic, Anaxarchus. disciple of Democritus, Callistbenes, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, 
 accompanied him. Diogenes Laeriius, ix. Also Zeller's Sioics. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 361 
 
 darting like the lightning east and west, and filling the 
 world with its flames. For him the elements are made ; 
 his foot plays all the pedals of the world's music ; history- 
 is but the echo of his march. The continents are dead 
 and silent everywhere, save where he moves and sum- 
 mons them to renovated life. 
 
 Alexander is not European after all. He belongs to 
 Iran. Of the thirteen years of his reign, eleven are spent 
 on the soil of Asia. Once leaving Macedon for the East, 
 he never returns. Greece emigrates in him ; her gods 
 follow the star of a master which may have risen in the 
 West, but which stays proudly in the Eastern sky, and the 
 Magi are not his guests but his hosts. Greek Dionysus 
 found a home in Eastern Asia, and men saw in the de- 
 bauches in which the conqueror stained his hand with the 
 blood of friends the god's revenge for his neglected 
 worship, or for the woes of his beloved Thebes. A new 
 Hercules frees Prometheus on a new Caucasus at the 
 opposite boundary of Iran, and his name is Alexander of 
 Macedon. 
 
 It was not without more positive grounds than these that 
 Iranian tradition adopted the invader into the line of native 
 kings. ^ For this was in ethnic truth the Agamemnon of 
 the East returning to claim his ancestral domain as well as 
 to punish the Achasmenides for invading Greece. He is 
 Iranian not only by the scene of his triumphs, but by his 
 Aryan descent, and even by the Orientalism of his govern- 
 ment, manners, and dress, and by the ungovernable pas- 
 sions which the situation developed in him, over which 
 even his Greek panegyrist can only mourn.^ This per- 
 sonality has the true Iranian dimensions, is the true type 
 of inward Iranian Dualism and moral struggle. The fierce 
 war of Ormuzd and Ahriman rages here on a scale which 
 
 ' Firdusi : Shah-Natneh. Hamza of Ispatian ; El Masudi ; Tabnri. 
 2 Arrian, iv. S. 
 
362 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 involves the fate of civilization. So the native legend 
 adopts him, and he becomes for it, as afterward for the 
 Mahometan chroniclers, the legitimate son of Darab (Da- 
 rius) by a daughter of Philip of Macedon, and the half- 
 brother of Darius Ochus, who is Darab's son by another 
 wife.^ He is the Iskander of the Shah-Nameh,^ brought 
 up at his father Philip's court, unconscious, like Cyrus, of 
 his royal rights, and succeeds to a tributary throne only to 
 throw off allegiance, and by defeat of Dara to reach his 
 ancestral crown. The historical groundwork of the con- 
 quest is worked up into a tale of mutual tenderness and 
 trust between the brother kings. Iskander weeps over the 
 dying Dara, receives his blessing, promises to avenge his 
 murder, to marry his daughter, and to spread the faith of 
 Zoroaster. The empire receives him with joy, and there 
 follows an epoch of order, prosperity, and glory ; while the 
 true successor of Kaianian kings makes Egypt and India 
 his tributaries, and attended by prodigies and omens visits 
 all the sacred shrines of Iran, and restores the supremacy 
 it had once enjoyed. The legend knows nothing of the 
 enormities which historians have ascribed to that march 
 from Tyre to the heart of India, the massacres in Phoeni- 
 cian cities, the deportations, the burning of Pcrsepolis, and 
 the slaughter on the sacred soil of Bactria. But they had 
 not been forgotten; nay, in some of the religious traditions, 
 they have been greatly exaggerated. It was this very in- 
 terfusion of terribly destructive elements with far more con- 
 spicuous ones that were truly creative and humane, which 
 made his history attractive to a race whose very conscious- 
 ness turned on the struggle of good and evil powers for 
 
 ' The Sluih-Xameh, the heroic epos of Persian legends and traditions covering the whole 
 life of Iran down to Alexander, gathered and compiled at the court of Ghuznin, was finally 
 wrouglit up by Firdusi, in the eleventh centur>-. 
 
 2 Even Spiegel, who singularly enough thinks the Iranians did not like Alexander, can- 
 not find any ground for believing this tradition to have a foreign origin. Eran. Alterth., 
 ii. 599. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 363 
 
 possession of the heroic will. These traditions endowed 
 Iskander with the symbolic gifts of this personal ideal, its 
 spells for commanding Nature, its talismans to bind de- 
 monic powers. They gave him the physical strength to 
 slay monsters, to repeat the labors of Hercules and his 
 prototype the sun, the intuition to foresee his destiny, the 
 piety to recognize the insignificance of kingdoms com- 
 pared with the service of God and man. 
 
 Nor does it appear that Firdusi, the restorer of the 
 Iranian legendary history, added any more of Islamitic 
 coloring to the traditional fame of Iskander than he gave 
 to those earlier heroes of the national legend, whose type, 
 thoroughly the same as Iskander's, has evidently preserved 
 its original features even under his Mussulman hands. As 
 it was the fitness of Alexander to fill this old type of ideal 
 personality that attracted the national genius, so only in 
 him could it rise to the height of its historical function. 
 To all ordinary personal forces that genius refused to re- 
 spond. The succession he bequeathed " to the strongest" 
 did not command its allegiance. The brief career of the 
 Seleucidae, lasting little more than half a century, only 
 irritated the people by using the powers he had gained to 
 suppress their religious faith and the local self-government 
 by which he had won their hearts. Though the dynasty 
 was not without energy as a whole, though Seleucus I. 
 had great gifts and swayed an empire almost as large as 
 that of Alexander himself, and though Antiochus Epipha- 
 nes achieved a fame as wide as it was odious (the Ahri- 
 man of Jew and Gentile), these heirs {diadochoi') of 
 Alexander's emipire were a blank for Persian imagination, 
 and furnished it no ideal food. The Seleucidae on the 
 Tigris and the Orontes, and the Parthian and Graeco- 
 Bactrian dynasties which ruled respectively the western 
 and eastern provinces that seceded from their empire, were 
 dropped from the national chronology. It wholly passed 
 
364 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 over the five and a half centuries between the death of 
 Alexander and the advent of the Sassanide Ardeshir, who 
 in the very spirit of the old heroic legend restored Iranian 
 freedom and faith. 
 
 It was the glory of Iran to feed the imagination of those 
 races which were making history with colossal types of 
 heroic Will. By no mytho-poetic accident did her great 
 Caspian headland front Europe with that eternal symbol 
 of Prometheus, unconquerable sufferer for the good of 
 man ; while close beside it towers the form of Zohak, 
 image of tyranny and hate, bound in hopeless chains 
 by Feridun, the spirit of freedom. Here personality 
 first becomes a universal idea, a world-consciousness. As 
 Cyrus had been the ideal of the highest Hebrew and Greek 
 intelligence, so Alexander became the ideal of far more 
 widely-spread intellectual and religious forces at a later 
 date. From the fascination of his world-opening career 
 no corner of civilization was exempt. For centuries hosts 
 of chronicles, itineraries, romances, myths, and legends mul- 
 tiplied around it, of ever}' race and every quality; but all 
 so dominated by his dazzling personality, that the thought- 
 ful historic annals of Arrian and Diodorus and Strabo, 
 and the learned (but not so trustworthy) compilation of 
 Plutarch, prove often as puzzling to the historic sense 
 as the palpable tissues of fable spun by a pseudo-Callis- 
 thenes, or a Ouintus Curtius, or by those mythologists of 
 Egypt, Armenia, and Rome, from whom their threads were 
 borrowed. 
 
 This grasp of the imagination, then first, we may say, set 
 free to work upon genuinel}^ historic materials and forces, 
 knew no limits in geographical space. All the weird stories 
 of supernatural phenomena and monstrous shapes of beasts 
 and men, with which the unexplored wilds of Central Asia 
 had been peopled, mainly on the authority of Ctesias's 
 Persian history, were woven into the marching robes of 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 365 
 
 this king of Nature and men.^ His glory was the honor 
 of all nations. Like Persia, Egypt claimed him as in the 
 direct line of her kings.^ The god of the Lybian desert 
 predicts his coming, and owns him as his son. Sesostris, 
 conqueror of continents, rises from his throne among the 
 dead, and visits him in vision, to sink his own fame in the 
 greater master who shall found a metropolis of nations, 
 and identify Egypt with an all-unifying name. Darius 
 Ochus and Serapis pay him similar honors. The Jew makes 
 him a worshipper of Jahveh and the savior of his Holy 
 Temple.^ The Alexandrian Greek makes him abolish all 
 the old cults, yet not by force, and become the apostle of 
 a universal theism, whose prayer to the " Eternal One," 
 at the head of his army, brings the Caspian mountains 
 together, that he may build gates of brass to bar out 
 Scythian Gog and Magog forever from the lands of the 
 true faith. ^ 
 
 Age after age brought fresh accessions to that Egyptian 
 epopee which, under the assumed name of Callisthenes, 
 continued down to the time of Firdusi, and even to the 
 Middle Ages, to be the main stream of this mythic lore.^ 
 It was conspicuous among the resources of Firdusi's muse. 
 In this legend an Egyptian Magus substitutes himself for 
 the god Ammon, and brings about with the wife of Philip 
 the divine birth he has himself predicted to her. Alex- 
 ander afterwards kills him ; but his statue at Memphis 
 speaks out to hail the world-master at his coming, and 
 places a globe on his head. Here Alexander instructs 
 his master Aristotle even in childhood, reconciles his 
 parents, slays his father's murderers, but scorns to harm 
 
 * Rapp {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geselhch., xx. 64). 
 
 ^ Pseudo-Callisthenes. 
 
 ^ Josephus : A titiquities of the 'Jews, xi. chaps, v. viii. 
 
 ^ Chassang : Histoire du Roman, p. 333. 
 
 ^ Tlirougli the Armenian translation, probably in the fifth century. For account of Pseudo- 
 Callisthenes, see Spiegel: Eran. Alterth.\\. -p c^%b,etseq. And Lessen : hidische Alterth., 
 ii. 734. Also Chassang : Histoire du Roman 
 
366 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 a foe who wounded him in battle ; forgives his enemies, 
 makes war only for humanity's sake, and binds the na- 
 tions in brotherly ties ; and, so testifies the Byzantine 
 age, dives to the depths of ocean and mounts to heaven 
 upon eagle's wings.^ 
 
 In later legends of the same cycle (plainly Mahometan), 
 he follows the setting sun to reach the fountain of im- 
 mortalit}-; nay, he hears the admonition of the Angel of 
 Judgment, waiting on his mountains for God's command 
 to blow the last trumpet. He learns the inherent neces- 
 sity of evil in the treasures of this world from the heap of 
 stones beside the way, from which he who takes and he 
 who refrains from taking shall be equally miserable ; be- 
 cause when they are found to be gems, the one becomes 
 wretched because he has not taken more, and the other 
 because he has not taken any when he might have had 
 what he would. His death is foretold him by a king 
 whom he finds throned within a mountain, and by two 
 trees of the desert that speak, the one by day, the other 
 by night, — the warning of Nature, if we may interpret 
 the myth, that even her master is also her child, and must 
 return to her bosom. When he lays his hand on the cof- 
 fers of the kings of Iran, she goes out of her way to re- 
 peat the same omen by a monstrous birth. Greeks and 
 Persians contend for the right to bury his body; but the 
 oracle gives it to Alexandria, where the wise of all nations 
 gather to celebrate his obsequies. 
 
 As the Jew claimed him as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, so 
 the Mussulman finds him at his Kaaba, and a Syrian poet 
 sings his praise as a follower of Christ.^ Mahomet him- 
 
 1 The Mahometan legends say tliat Alexander came to Abraham while he was building 
 the temple of Mecca with Ismae), and acknowledged him as the messenger of Allah, and 
 walked seven times round the place. They describe him as able to turn day into night and 
 night into day, by unfurling one or the other of two magic standards, and so defeating his foes 
 at his will ; and even as having found himself so near the sun in a dream that he was able to 
 seize him at his two ends. Weil: Biblical Legends^ p. 70- 
 
 ^ Spiegel : Eran. Altertk., ii. 607. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 367 
 
 self celebrates him, it is commonly believed, under the 
 name Dhu'lkarnain (the Two-horned), as a prophet sent 
 to chastise the impious and reward the just with easy 
 yoke ; who prefers the service of God to the tributes of the 
 nations.^ Mussulman writers placed him beside Moses, 
 Abraham, Jesus, and the rest to whom revelations had 
 come. In the Chronicle of Nizami, he is the son of a 
 pious Hebrew woman, adopted by Philip, — a saint and 
 sage, more than a king.^ By the gift of a stone, which 
 outweighs everything save a handful of dust, the angels 
 cure him of the desire to gain the whole world. A city 
 whence men are summoned away one by one, to vanish in 
 a mountain, and cannot be held back from obeying the 
 call even by his kingly power, teaches him the inevitable- 
 ness of death. How mythology, the world over, holds all 
 lords and masters to spiritual realities and ethical laws ! 
 What transforming power there is in the wand of imagi- 
 nation, to bring a world-conqueror from his throne of 
 centuries to his knees, before the primal conditions of 
 human life and personal success ! — a process whose 
 operation illustrates the unhistorical character of ideal- 
 ization of the founders of religions and States, while at 
 the same time it teaches that such imaginative construc- 
 tions are under control of the conscience and aspirations 
 of mankind. 
 
 To Mirkhond, the great Persian historian of the fifteenth 
 century, Alexander's name signifies " lover of wisdom." ^ 
 He is the ideal philosopher as well as king. He receives 
 from Philip political counsels as fine as those which the 
 Cyrus of Xenophon hears from Cambyses ; for the natural 
 flow of wisdom from age to youth, from father to son, is 
 a premise of our ideal sense of continuity, which asserts 
 itself wherever it is permitted to do so. He must make no 
 
 1 Koran, sura xviii. Sq, go. = Spiegel : Eran. Alterth., ii. p. 607. 
 
 ' Shea's Translation (Oriental Fund Series), p. 36S, 369. 
 
368 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 distinction in his treatment of rich and poor, Persian and 
 Turk, remote and near, farmer and soldier, native and 
 stranger. He must never be indifferent to the sufferer, 
 nor oppress the poor.^ Before the assembled nobles, after 
 his father's death, he disclaims all special rights, consult- 
 ing their judgment as one of themselves, and accepts the 
 throne only at their desire. So for near two thousand years 
 endures the repute of Alexander for having identified his 
 conquests with local and personal liberties. His victories 
 are in Allah's name, and his letters are Moslem sermons. 
 Even while, as true Moslem, he must of course have de- 
 stroyed " the accursed faith of the Magi," it is admitted 
 that he had all their science translated into Greek.^ All 
 the wise men in Persia, India, Maccdon, shower on him the 
 didactics of ancient wisdom; but not even the Brahmins 
 can reprove his destructive trade of war without being 
 silenced by his credentials from the Creator to overturn 
 unbelief and wrong everywhere, — " commands which I 
 will faithfully execute till I die." ^ He institutes discus- 
 sions between rival creeds and schools, and exalts the 
 Hindu sage, who can answer all his questions and inter- 
 pret all symbolic acts and gifts. He answers those who 
 ask things impossible, even for his power, with edifying 
 self-depreciation and humble recognition of human limits. 
 Here is the Mahometan ideal of Nushirvan and Akbar 
 referred back to a period eight hundred years before 
 Mahomet was born. Into this tribute-heap arc thrown 
 aphoristic treasures, old and new, till the conversational 
 wisdom of Iskander is a catechism of the virtues for any 
 age. 
 
 " In what should a king show perseverance?" " In meditating; 
 on the interests of his people by night, and securing them by day." — ■ 
 " From what do you gain most pleasure ? " " From rewarding good 
 service." — " The day passed without redressing some wrong or grant- 
 
 1 Shea's Translation (Oriental Fund Series), p. 377. - Ibid., p.396. ' Ibid., p. 405. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 369 
 
 ing some petition, is no part of life." — " My instructor deserves more 
 of my respect than my father, because my father brought me from 
 heaven to earth ; but Aristotle raised me from earth to heaven." — 
 " I refuse to make stealthy attacks, by night, on an enemy." — "The 
 noble mind, even of a poor man, is forever held in honor ; but the 
 mean person, of whatever rank, is condemned." — " Man wants under- 
 standing more than wealth." ^ 
 
 His last message is a tender letter to his mother. Over 
 his remains the sages moralize on the contrast of his glory 
 with his dust; and then with the tribute that "Fortune has 
 hidden him from human gaze, like treasures of silver and 
 gold," consign him to his Alexandrian grave, " enveloped 
 in the mercy and forgiveness of the Almighty, whose per- 
 fection endures while all things else decay." ^ 
 
 Quite as marvellous as this decree of natural change 
 over which the Mussulman sages moralize in awe, is the 
 contrast between the Alexander of history and these 
 products of religious tradition, weaving ideals of succes- 
 sive ages around his name. While the pith and point in 
 Plutarch's sayings of Alexander befit a master-mind that 
 swayed men as it did nations, the commonplaces of the 
 Mussulman ideal belong to a traditional moralist or a 
 meditative saint. Probably no other character in history 
 has afforded scope for a similar variety of construction. 
 Such the universality of his function in history ; such the 
 significance for the future of the first appearance of per- 
 sonal supremacy, on a scale that matched the importance 
 of that element in the evolution of humanity as a whole. 
 
 Such a Titanic force was not only accorded ideal rights 
 by the voice of mankind, but strictly held to correspond- 
 ing ideals of duty. And this moral criticism of one whose 
 reported claim was that of being adored as an incarnate 
 god is extremely creditable to the ages immediately suc- 
 ceeding him. Yet the fact is, that most of the crimes 
 
 ' Shea's Translation (Oriental Fund Series), pp. 421-26. - Ibid., pp. 42S-29. 
 
 24 
 
370 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 recorded against him are such as grew inevitably out of 
 the dehrium of his success and the real or imaginary- 
 perils from friend and foe which the situation involved. 
 The difficulty of reconciling his outbreaks of fur}' with the 
 grandeur, or at least the breadth, of his purpose and the 
 equity of his general conduct, is increased by the puzzling 
 variety of testimony and explanation concerning them. 
 And we hardly know whether to ascribe these outbreaks 
 to an intense nervous susceptibility which drove him to 
 the madness of rage in his grief over the natural death of 
 one friend,^ and made his hasty revenge on another pro- 
 duce a revulsion of conscience to the insanity of despair,^ 
 or to believe that none of these dark tragedies have 
 been related in their true connection with events. Per- 
 haps here, as often elsewhere, the wine-cup is deep and 
 red enough to solve much of the mystery. But careful 
 study of the biographies of Alexander confirms the old 
 belief, that, however superior to vulgar conquerors, he was 
 in many respects a slave of unregulated passions, and es- 
 pecially of an ambition for personal sway, which could 
 efface for the moment every consideration of mercy, jus- 
 tice, or private affection that appeared to stand in its path. 
 The splendid star of empire that beckoned him in his early 
 youth, when he complained that Philip was leaving him no 
 lands to conquer,^ gathered more and more of earthly ex- 
 halations about it, which showed that it was not made to 
 shine steadily in the heavenl}' ether. It is painful, as we 
 follow his track, to see how his victories multiplied the 
 sharp temptations of his lower instincts, — necessities of 
 cruel wrong, monstrous delusions about the plans and 
 motives of others, barbarous sacrifices of life (brutal in- 
 dulgences), and the slaughter of friend after friend upon 
 suspicion, or in the fury of intoxication. These were the 
 
 ^ Death of Hcfihiestion (Arrian), vii. 14. = Death of Clitus (Arrian), iv. 9. 
 
 ■"' Plutarch: Lfe of Alcxaml r 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 371 
 
 dreadful fatalities of a battle waged not against kingdoms 
 so much as against nature, against possibility, against all 
 rivalry of gods or men. Even Arrian, a most lenient 
 judge, and perhaps the most dispassionate of his biogra- 
 phers, does not pretend to know what he designed ; but 
 " undertakes to say that he would never have been satis- 
 fied with victories, but would have been roving after places 
 more remote from human knowledge. If he could have 
 found no other foe to encounter, his own mind would 
 have kept him in a constant state of warfare." ^ This is, we 
 repeat, the incarnation of that internecine strife of the Two 
 Principles, which belonged to the Iranian conception of life 
 and the universe. The terrible conditions of that world- 
 development were, that for three thousand years Ahriman 
 should be master, though the germs of Ormuzd's victory 
 are struggling and shaping through the whole ; so that 
 the very deliverance of the world must be purchased by 
 the costly sacrifice of the noblest part of men's natures 
 to the worst. The representative of this process is the 
 career of personal Will. Translated into the facts of his- 
 tory, it has no type so perfect as Alexander's towering 
 ambition, and its tragic fates of good and evil. By its 
 triumph should man be brought to the consciousness of 
 his unity. But the master-will shall not come to its throne 
 without the slaughter of the man's own best instincts in the 
 terrible struggle with opposing wills that must be trodden 
 under his feet. Such the plane on which the conflict moved, 
 pointing beyond itself to higher planes ; such the inevi- 
 table conditions, of which he who should play the role of 
 conqueror must be the instrument, — subject none the less 
 to moral forces, since our responsibility is forever proved 
 real by what we are, and by what our condition brings. 
 Neither Sophocles nor Shakspeare has fathomed the tra- 
 gedy of personal character which is involved in every step 
 
 1 Ex,'>fr!iiwn of Alexander, vii. i. 
 
3/2 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 of human progress. Only the grandeur of the end can 
 absorb the anguish with which we must contemplate the 
 actual implications of every great historic function. And 
 our judgment alike of the suffering and the shame is 
 obliged to accept that personal equation which interprets 
 both these elements by the conditions of the age and its 
 work ; its susceptibilities of pain and pleasure, good and 
 ill; its alternatives of choice; its ideal hopes, which direct 
 the currents of individual aim ; and the infinite stress of 
 its invisible forces, which must smooth their own most 
 destructive track through the natures they have them- 
 selves prepared to be their instruments. Even contem- 
 porary history records only the striking facts, the patent 
 results, and these inaccurately at best: their causes and 
 conditions and their spiritual quality, in the minds of the 
 actors, lie mainly beyond its ken. If a past age cannot 
 give these elements for judging its own leaders, our later 
 times must supply them in part, by discerning the extent 
 to which those leaders were, as they largely must have 
 been, representatives of the age, as we now comprehend 
 it, — their characters and conduct the work of its hand. 
 
 In the case of Alexander, we have the most conspicuous 
 instance in history of the representation in one man's life 
 and destiny of the power of an age to shape its instrument 
 to its own historic purpose. In him its constructive as 
 well as its destructive energies found play. And in our 
 respect for the criticism which he received through all 
 the glamour of his success, we cannot forget that the 
 very historical conditions which rendered such criticism 
 possible were in part results of the stimulus given by 
 him to moral forces of which he was no mere passive 
 instrument, but to some extent a conscious and earnest 
 producer. He who can effect the advance to an ethical 
 standard higher than his own conditions allowed, and capa- 
 ble of bringing his own life into judgment, is, even on that 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 373 
 
 ground, an ideal factor in the ethical education of mankind. 
 And while we willingly hear Juvenal and Lucian satirize 
 his claim to divinity,^ and the sophist Theocritus with keen 
 wit tell his friends to " keep up their hearts, so long as 
 they see the gods dying sooner than men ; " while we re- 
 spond to the somewhat rhetorical protest of Seneca, against 
 the eternum crhnen, the death of Callisthenes, as sufficient 
 in his opinion to outweigh everything that could be said 
 for "the first of generals and kings," ^ — we must interline 
 these and similar criticisms with the half-conscious testi- 
 mony of their authors to the justice of even an Iranian 
 hero-worship in his case. The supposed audacity of 
 claiming the name and honor of a god is somewhat 
 modified by the practical resemblance of most of the 
 Greek gods to men ; by the frequency of a supposed title 
 to divine descent ; and by the traditional habits of Oriental 
 allegiance. Arrian says distinctly that the " adoration " 
 given was " after the Persian manner." It was the Greek 
 custom, as we know, for great families to claim descent 
 from the gods ; and Alexander had been taught to trace 
 his own through three lines of demi-gods to Jupiter him- 
 self.^ Lucian's Diogenes in Hades sneers at the " king of 
 kings," — " So you too are dead like the rest of us ! " but 
 his own impartial Minos decides that Alexander is greater 
 than Scipio or Hannibal, great as they are.* Juvenal and 
 Seneca, writing from the abstract ethical standpoint, lose 
 some of their force as soon as we reflect on the historical 
 relations and conditions which they wholly leave out of 
 sight. Arrian, whose version of Callisthenes' courageous 
 rebuke of Alexander's pretensions to deity gives this phi- 
 losopher the highest claim on our sympathy, nevertheless 
 thinks he was justly odious to the king for his stiff and 
 
 1 Satire, x. Dialogue, xix. 
 
 ' QucEsiiones Naiurales, vi. 23. See Arrian, iv. 10, ir, 14. 
 
 * Arrian, iv. 10. ^ Dialogue, xviii. xix. 
 
374 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 sour ways, and that his own conduct greatly strengthened 
 the suspicions to which he fell a victim.^ Neither this 
 nor any other acts of violence of which he allows his 
 hero to have been guilty, prevented Arrian from affirm- 
 ing that in comparison with his great and laudable acts 
 his vices were few and trifling; that he cannot but have 
 been the special instrument of a divine care ; that no one 
 was ever comparable with him ; that he was strictly ob- 
 servant of his own promises, vigilant to detect the treach- 
 ery of others, and " as indifferent to the pleasures of the 
 body, as he was insatiable in the desires of his mind." ^ 
 Curtius, who charges Alexander with extreme injustice 
 and cruelty towards Callisthenes, " for which he sought 
 to make amends by a repentance which came too late," ^ 
 has, notwithstanding this, put upon his lips the most effec- 
 tive defences of his policy and conduct, and praises the 
 noble qualities of his heart, — his constancy, clemency, 
 good faith, and self-restraint in all pleasure, making only 
 one exception, " an inexcusable passion for wine."* As to 
 this affair of Callisthenes, it is to be remembered that Aris- 
 totle had warned his friend that his sharp tongue would 
 probably bring him to an early death,^ and that he had the 
 name of being capable of making Alexander a god in his 
 writings, and yet joking at his divinity among his friends.^ 
 The horrible cruelties said by some to have been inflicted 
 on him are simply incredible and absurd. Lucan, in the 
 effort to set off his own divinity, Julius Caesar, calls the 
 Macedonian " a conquering brigand ; " '^ yet his Caesar cares 
 more for visiting this " brigand's " grave than for anything 
 else in Alexandria ; and his own Roman pride is mortified 
 
 1 Expedition of Alexander, iv. ii, 12. ^ Ibid., vii. 28, 29. 
 
 s History of Alexander the Great, viii. 8. * Ibid., v. 7. 
 
 ^ Diogenes Laertius : Life of Aristotle. 
 
 8 Chassang : Histoire du Ratnan. Arrian (iv. 8) admits that he was occasionally subject 
 to this passion, to which he ascribes the killing of Clitus. 
 ' Lucan : Pkarsalia, bk. x. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 375 
 
 by the confession that a single province of the " brigand's " 
 empire is great enough to defy the imperial arms. Or 
 what credit shall we accord to Curtius, when in the same 
 breath with his praises of this hero of his romance for 
 self-restraint in all pleasures but wine, he describes him 
 as having kept three hundred and sixty concubines, and 
 given himself up to debauchery among the courtesans 
 of Persepolis? ^ 
 
 The Zoroastrian priesthood put Alexander in hell for 
 burning the " Nosks " of the Zend-Avesta at Persepolis, 
 pretending to account in that way for the supposed dis- 
 appearance of their sacred volume till the time of the 
 Sassanides, and charge the destruction of that splendid 
 city, as does Curtius also, upon a drunken debauch, in 
 which Alexander was incited to the act by the courtesan 
 Thais.^ But the best authorities agree that only the palace 
 with its environs was burned, and this as a foolish act of 
 requital for Xerxes' pillage of Athens; ^ and there are am- 
 ple proofs that Persepolis was a flourishing city from the 
 time of Alexander to the age of Julian.^ Equally unhis- 
 torical is the story that the writings of Zoroaster were 
 destroyed by Alexander, since the religious books of the 
 Persians were used by Hermippus a century afterwards. 
 They were in fact destroyed by Mahometan fanaticism nearly 
 a thousand years after Alexander's time. It was contrary 
 to his fixed policy and his natural instinct to treat native 
 literatures and faiths otherwise than with respect. In spite 
 of the odium tJieologiciim of the Zoroastrians, ten Persian 
 poets have sung the " Alexander-Saga." 
 
 It were well for the fame of the conqueror if the sack of 
 Tyre and the enslavement of its population, the massacres 
 and executions in India and Bactria, and above all the 
 
 ' HUtory of Alexander the Great, v. 7. 2 Ibid. 
 
 3 Diodorus, xvii. 2. Arriau, iii 18. Plutarch: Life of Alexander {^Vc3!oo). 
 * Diodorus, xix. 22. 2 Maccabees, ix. 11. Ammianus Ularcellinus, xxiii. 9. Arrian, 
 vi. 30. 
 
376 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 homicide of Clitus, the death-warrants of Philotas and Par- 
 menio, could be disposed of as easily as the conflagration 
 of the Persian capital. It is no part of our purpose to 
 discuss the various and contradictory accounts of many 
 of these apparent atrocities ; the testimony is too strong to 
 be dismissed, that here were deeds that would shame the 
 noblest record. Some of the palliations that have been 
 offered for them are not wanting in force, — such as the ex- 
 asperation of obstinate conflict, and the extremity of per- 
 sonal peril, — though by far the strongest is the universal 
 testimony that his violent acts were generally the result of 
 sudden frenzy, and succeeded by equally violent remorse.^ 
 But if we abandon the disgraceful tradition that this son 
 of the gods was in the habit of brawling with his friends 
 over their cups, we are thrown back on the worse alterna- 
 tive that his paroxysms of rage had not even the excuse 
 of drunkenness. Scandal-mongers, flatterers, false wit- 
 nesses, ambitious companions, old national grudges (as 
 against Persepolis and Tyre), plotters against his life,^ the 
 passions of his followers, the unbridled rage of his soldiery, 
 the demands of turbulent Macedonian chiefs to judge and 
 sentence suspected persons, the necessity of sharp and 
 decisive blows in case of rebellion or treachery, — all must 
 take their share of responsibility for these acts, and it is 
 assuredly not a small one. But these associations were 
 simply the natural dramatis personce of the play. How 
 could a man in any age of the world command divine 
 honors to be paid not only to himself but to his friends, 
 boasting that he was not only a god but could make gods,^ 
 without bringing such furies of temptation and torment as 
 those around him in hosts? Arrian tells us he promised 
 Cleomenes that if certain temples to Hephasstion in Egypt 
 
 * See especially Justin, xii. 6. 
 
 2 Arrian tells us that a plot was really formed to kill Alexander, in which Philotas was 
 concerned ; and that it was discovered through Ptolemy. Expedition of Alexander, iv. 13. 
 
 3 Lucian. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 377 
 
 were built strictly according to his orders, he would forgive 
 all the crimes that officer might afterwards commit. " To 
 give such license to a man of cruel disposition," adds the 
 historian, " admits of no excuse." ^ One fact remains, 
 after all has been said, — Alexander was the spoiled child 
 of success. The confusion of his biographers as to his 
 character arises from the fact that his character changed, 
 and at every phase made such powerful assertion of itself 
 that every phase seemed equally valid. It has been 
 allowed by all, that contact with Asiatic taste and colossal 
 temptations gradually corrupted the simplicity of his Greek 
 nature.^ The treachery of friends and officials, too, de- 
 stroyed his faith in others. After such experiences, " he 
 became more and more ready to give credit to accusations, 
 and inflict severest punishments on slightest offenders, on 
 suspicion of plots." ^ 
 
 Here on the soil of Iran the worship of personal Will 
 rose to its absolute idea by the very nature of men and 
 things, and the human master could not stop short of 
 pronouncing himself a god. We cannot but think that 
 this later consummation of his life has been transferred 
 to its beginning, in fastening such precocious egotisms 
 upon his youth as the saying that "heaven could not suf- 
 fer two suns, nor earth two masters;"* or the complaint 
 that " out of the infinite number of worlds, he could not 
 be master of one."^ This would be preternatural in the 
 boy-prince of a petty kingdom ; but it can hardly be 
 called audacity in one who had actually swept the civil- 
 ized world with his conquering sword. 
 
 It would seem that the laws of human progress were 
 responsible for the Oriental worship of Alexander. Na- 
 ture had produced a man-child fit for that personal ideal 
 
 * Expeditio7i of Alexander, vii. 23. 
 
 ^ Sainte-Croix : Exainen des aticiens hisioriens d^Alexatidre-le-Grand, p. 376. 
 
 ^ Arrian, vii. 41. 4 Diodorus, xvii. S4- 
 
 ^ Plutarch : De TraugiiilUtate A nimi, iv. 
 
378 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 through which alone man could advance to a world-civil- 
 ization. The tribes must have been less or more than 
 human not to have adored Alexander. A century before 
 his accession Macedonia was scarcely a State; its petty 
 princedoms were in feudal strife ; its few towns were held 
 by southern Greeks ; its kings were regarded as barbarous 
 chiefs, though claiming to be of Argive descent. At the 
 death of Philip it had mastered Greece by policy and war ; 
 and Greek culture had penetrated it, in spite of more than 
 one threatened return to barbarism. -Yet it seemed on the 
 point of disintegration. Alexander succeeded to a throne 
 whose occupancy was usually determined by assassination. 
 He inherited an empty treasury, royal domains mortgaged 
 for a heavy debt, and the charge of a mother whose ex- 
 travagance was only equalled by the evil fame which threw 
 suspicion on the legitimacy of her son. His early habits 
 of frugality could have had no worse impediment than her 
 pampering hands. The mountain tribes were preparing 
 to revolt. Subject Greece was discontented, Sparta hos- 
 tile, Athens intriguing with Persia to seize the moment of 
 a change of kings " to check and depress the rising king- 
 dom." But Alexander proved his descent from Jove. He 
 instantly passed every barrier, mastered Pan-Hellenes and 
 Amphictyons, received from both councils higher honors 
 than his father had ; and, aided by a sagacity in choice 
 of counsellors as great as his energy in the field, at once 
 created an impression of majesty that made his visible 
 presence needless, and allowed him to turn with all his 
 resources to the punishment of the Persian King. 
 
 And these resources were all original. His Asiatic vic- 
 tories were not won by veteran Greeks.^ Scarce one of 
 his generals was of the old Greek stock; they were Mace- 
 donians, as was the mass of his army. The tactics and the 
 battle-order of Alexander were, like everything he effected, 
 
 ' Arrian : Indica, cap. xviii. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 379 
 
 revolutions on the traditional method. He made the old 
 phalanx mobile, armed it with the long spear, and, while 
 drawing forth its utmost capacities, supplied its defects with 
 corps of light infantry and cavalry trained to manoeuvre on 
 any ground, and to match the dash of their leader in scour- 
 ing the deserts and surprising armies and towns. Before 
 the masterly combinations of this earlier Napoleon, no 
 Asiatic army, however immense, could stand. And every 
 resistless line of steel moved, after all, within his single heart 
 and brain. It was these that made void every obstacle, — 
 the jealous chiefs and turbulent soldiery; the Bactrian 
 snows and mountain passes; the terrible heats, droughts, 
 and famines of the Gedrosian coast; the numerous satraps, 
 watching for chances to start rebellions and set up gov- 
 ernments for themselves ; the vast populations of ancient 
 cities and countries. Amidst it all, this band of conquerors 
 moved like some volcanic wave, confident as though on 
 their own soil. It is impossible to mistake the source of 
 their inspiration ; nothing like it has been seen, perhaps, in 
 military history. Exposing himself to the extreme of peril, 
 wounded again and again, directing every detail of per- 
 sonal government, and, in spite of all occasional excesses, 
 choosing always the short path to victory, and combining 
 the elements of every situation with far-sighted policy to 
 the accomplishment of a purpose that grew vaster with 
 every step, — to all human conception, in that day, Alex- 
 ander verily acted the god. When his life was despaired 
 of, the panic of the little army, so audacious in his strength, 
 was equalled only by its grief; and when, as if by miracle, 
 he was preserved again and again, it seemed to their deli- 
 rious joy that Earth and Heaven waited on his will.^ The 
 march back to the Phoenician coast-cities, and the slow 
 siege of Tyre were not the waste of time and strength 
 they seemed ; ^ they gave him that command of the sea 
 
 ' Arrian, vi. 13. ' Ibid., ii 17. 
 
380 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 without which he was lost. Striking at once at the great 
 cities, as if devoid of prudence, he really gained the fame of 
 a deliverer and the greater prestige of centralized power. 
 
 Lavish to his soldiers, often magnanimous to his foes ; 
 considerate of differences that called for distinctions in 
 treatment of persons ; master of the arts of pleasing and 
 rewarding,^ — Alexander knew how to unite the paternal 
 spirit of the great Cyrus with a serene assumption of right- 
 ful ownership in all Asia, which seemed to make doubt of 
 the claim a crime. It is related that he at first forbade 
 his soldiers to plunder the conquered nations, because 
 these were their own countrymen ; and the story at least 
 perfectly illustrates his attitude, which was the most effec- 
 tive possible, even in a strategic point of view. His man- 
 agement of the Greek States during the Asiatic campaigns 
 was masterly; on the one hand, losing no opportunity of 
 winning their gratitude by restoring their exiles, releasing 
 their envoys to Darius after Issus, liberating and honoring 
 their Ionian cities, sending trophies to their temples, pay- 
 ing devotion to their traditional gods and heroes every- 
 where, and specially encouraging the democratic spirit, as 
 in his present to Athens of the statues of the patriot tyran- 
 nicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton ; while, on the other 
 hand, keeping in custody the Spartan agents at the Persian 
 Court (the Greeks who had entered Persian service after 
 the league between Greece and Macedon) as hostages 
 for the fidelity of their countrymen at home.'^ He dis- 
 cerned that the part of pacificator among nations and 
 races was at once the true function of a hero, and the only 
 path to universal empire. And this double motive explains 
 his assumption of Oriental forms and manners ; his amal- 
 gamation of Greeks and Asiatics ; his training hosts of 
 Asiatic youths {Epigoni) in Greek disciplines;^ his per- 
 
 1 Arrian, i. 18, 19; ill. 24, 27; iv. 21. " Ibid., ii. 15 ; i. 30 ; iii. 24. 
 
 2 Ibid. , vii. 6. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 38 I 
 
 sistent refusal to gratify his Macedonians to the sacrifice 
 of the conquered tribes and chiefs ; and the energy with 
 which he suppressed their discontents on this score, es- 
 pecially at Opis, crowning his success with a grand Feast 
 of Reconciliation, celebrated with religious rites and joyful 
 games. ^ 
 
 Conquest develops a " Scamp Jupiter " out of an 
 Apollo ; but we cannot refuse Alexander the credit of 
 having recognized something of the function which his 
 conquests were to fulfil in human history. He was no 
 vulgar marauder. His tastes were for the society of schol- 
 ars, the books and the men whom all ages revere. He 
 had thought and studied, and knew what his own age had 
 to teach and to transmit. In the uncertainty resting on 
 all individual statements about him, it is of great signifi- 
 cance that on this point all testimonies agree. " Puer 
 acerrimis literarum studiis eruditus," says Justin. Pliny 
 makes him the centre of art and artists, and supplies one 
 of the finest symbols in the history of literature when he 
 pictures him putting the poems of Homer in the costliest 
 casket he could find among his Persian spoils.^ We are 
 told that he often cited verses of Euripides, sometimes large 
 portions of his dramas at once ; that he enjoyed Pindar's 
 lyrics, and chose Achilles among the heroes of the Iliad, 
 as was natural enough. " He invaded Persia," says Plu- 
 tarch, " with greater assistance from Aristotle than from 
 Philip." 3 And if we go over the ethical and political 
 ideas of the Stagirite, we shall find that the statement is 
 not without confirmation in much of Alexander's history.* 
 
 ^ Arrlan, vii. ii. Dicdorus Siculus. 
 
 ^ Pliny : Natitral History^ vii. 30. 
 
 !* " That Aristotle accompanied Alexander, or that plants and animals were sent to him 
 for examination from distant districts, is mere talk. Aristotle confined himself to the knowl- 
 edge of his own day, and was convinced that this was all that was of real imponance to solve 
 all the principal problems."— Lange : History 0/ Materialism^ i. 83. Westminster Review, 
 July, 1881. 
 
 ^ Politics, V. II ; vi. 8; iii. 15, 16, 17 ; i. 2, 4. Ethics, viii. 10, 11 ; ii. 7 ; iv. i ; x. 7. 
 
382 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 The clear distinctions between a tyrant and a king; the 
 assertion of moral responsibility in king and people alike, 
 of limits to monarchical power, of the right of all men to 
 be well governed ; the wise praises of moderation, and 
 warnings against enslavement to passion; the democratic 
 bias, marred though it is by the advocacy of slavery as an 
 appointment of Nature; above all, the praise of intellect 
 and of living for the best idea, — these elements of the 
 Aristotelian doctrine may well have had their influence in 
 producing many of the noble purposes and acts recorded 
 of Alexander in the earlier part of his career. Intellec- 
 tually an apt pupil, in instincts of liberty and breadth of 
 human interest he probably was far beyond his master. 
 Of Alexander no praise seems to have been thought ex- 
 travagant. To a poet who did not meet appreciation one 
 said, " Hadst thou lived when Alexander lived, for every 
 verse he would have given thee an island or a territory." 
 His person was the despair of artists, till one said, " I will 
 compass it; I will shape Mount Athos into Alexander's 
 likeness, with feet reaching to the seas, with a fair city in 
 his left hand, and his right pouring as constant drink a 
 great river into the waves." But Alexander said, " Let 
 Athos alone ; it is already a monument of vanquished 
 vanity. Our portrait the snowy Caucasus, the towering 
 Emodon, the Tanais, and the Caspian shall draw."^ "He 
 was happier than other conquerors," writes Pausanias, " in 
 that his felicity was least of all assisted by treachery." ^ 
 The tribute of the historian of Egypt, that we trace his 
 conquering march in that country, " not by ruin, misery, 
 and anarchy, but by the building of cities, the adminis- 
 tration of justice, the growth of leaning,"^ is, not\vithstand- 
 ing the exceptions we have mentioned, in great degree true 
 of his whole career. 
 
 * Plutarch: Fortune or Virhie of Alexander. 
 ' Itinerary ; or Description cf Greece, vii. 10. 
 3 Sharpe : £'^'/; (English edition, i?46), p. 116. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 383 
 
 And here is the point of reconcihation between the man 
 and the instrument; between what he was and what was 
 done through him. Such points of contact there must 
 always be, or the continuity of historic cause and effect 
 would be broken. Sainte-Croix, whose studies of the bio- 
 graphers of Alexander are more valuable for comparison 
 of evidences as to facts than for criticism of motives or 
 opinions, makes light of the idea that he was moved by 
 any universal ideas or noble purposes whatever: ^ nothing 
 but one man's unscrupulous ambition conquered the world. 
 It is impossible to believe that the unquestionably direct 
 effects of this all-embracing mastership are traceable to a 
 personal cause so ignoble. To refute it, we need not rely 
 on his reputation with every biographer for occasional acts 
 or constant habits of heroism ; on his sparing the tombs of 
 patriot-dead at Thebes, his sending prisoners and exiles to 
 their homes, his generosity to the family of Darius, his 
 courteous and honorable treatment of noble women com- 
 mitted to his care, his agony at the death of his friends, 
 his remorse for his own excesses.^ There are stories by 
 the best authorities that show him watching all night in 
 cold and peril beside his old preceptor, who had fallen 
 exhausted in the wilds of Anti-Libanus, and by personal 
 attack on a hostile camp securing the means of preserv- 
 ing his life ; pouring away the water sent him by his 
 thirsty soldiers in a terrible drought, saying, " If I alone 
 drink, these good men will be dispirited ; " ^ drinking a 
 potion before the face of the physician who had prepared 
 it, after having shown him a letter in which he was charged 
 with intent to poison ; * telling a queen who had addressed 
 his friend Hephaestion as the king, that she was right, " for 
 this man also is Alexander;" persisting in disbelief of 
 
 1 Examen des anciens historiens d^ Alexandrc-lc-Grand. 
 ^ Pausaiiias ; BcBoiica,x\\. Qiiintus Cuiti'.'.s, v. 5. 
 ' Plutarch: Life of Alexander. 
 * Arrian, ii 4. 
 
384 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 treachery in Harpalus till compelled to admit it, with a 
 shock that told bitterly on his faith in men. Plutarch 
 ventures to report as from him such rare sayings as these : 
 " There is something noble in hearing oneself ill-spoken 
 of, when one is doing well; " " God is the common father 
 of men, but specially of the good." 
 
 Nothing can deprive Alexander of the glory of having 
 aimed with enthusiasm, if not with constancy, at uniting 
 mankind in following out the possibilities of progress in 
 that wonderful age. In this form of imperial influence he 
 instinctively led the way, in his passion for the ideal 
 State throwing aside the social distinctions founded by 
 Aristotle on slow inductions from the past. We may well 
 believe the tradition that in making Greek and Barbarian 
 equal before the law, he acted against the philosopher's 
 specific counsel.-^ A striking illustration of this policy 
 was his permitting his opponents in Greece to abide by 
 the decision of the Amphictyons, instead of having them 
 sent to Macedon for trial.^ He won the hearts of the 
 Egyptians by granting independent government by native 
 rulers, and in accordance with national customs and laws ; 
 and charmed their priesthood by offering worship in the 
 temple of the national god, as his son, after the manner 
 of the ancient kings.^ He in fact sought to accomplish 
 in the political world what Aristotle pursued in the scien- 
 tific only. How much finer than Napoleon's reconstruction 
 of the map of Europe in his own dynastic interests, under 
 the name of popular rights, was Alexander's establishment, 
 at every commanding point in Egypt and Asia, of cities 
 that should be nurseries in Greek culture for States re- 
 manded to native rulers and under free governments ! 
 Here the splendid intellectual and political genius of 
 Hellas mingled with Oriental passion and imagination, to 
 
 ^ Plutarch : Fortune or Virtue pf Alexander, i. 6. 
 
 - Pausanias, vii. 10. •^ Sharpe : Egyptian hiscriptions. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 385 
 
 initiate the best elements of modern science and faith, ^ 
 and especially the all-creative sense of iniity and univer- 
 sality, whose far-brought germs have grown to maturity 
 only in our day. The Neoplatonic and Jewish elements, 
 combined in Alexandria to give early Christianity its power 
 of expansion and adaptability to the demands of thought, 
 and to free it from its original narrowness of scope, 
 were brought together by this mighty centralizing force. 
 Perhaps no point in the history of that transition has 
 greater interest than the profound connection of the Al- 
 exandrian philosophy with Oriental conceptions of mon- 
 archy, as seen in the imperialism of its First Principle, 
 — an essence lying behind all human experience, above 
 all conceivable processes of life, and uniting Greek science 
 with a mediatorial conception of ascending grades and 
 orders of function towards the unapproachable One.^ 
 This speculative idea the growth of Alexander's empire 
 had made the palpable suggestion of experience. On a 
 quite different track the influence of these conquests was 
 almost equally important. Absorbing all political ambi- 
 tions in centralized forces, personal and organic, they left 
 freer play for private and domestic interests, and led to 
 a greater recognition of them in literature.^ The New 
 Comedy, one of the most fruitful sources of the study 
 of human nature and social elements in all history, arose 
 after Alexander had brouglit the exciting conflicts of races 
 and States into quiet, so far at least as the above sugges- 
 tion of unity and order in the political sphere could be so 
 called ; and this not only without destroying freedom of 
 speech and of study, but by greatly encouraging it.* 
 
 But Alexander did not merely found cities, whose free 
 cultures were germs of future civilization ; he personally 
 provided such cities with men who proved competent to 
 
 * See Zeller's Stoics, p. 15 (English edition). - Ibid., p. 3.). 
 
 ' Ibid., p. 18. * Chassang: Histoire dii Roman, pp. 3S9, 434. 
 
 25 
 
386 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 build institutions that were themselves civilizations, — the 
 Museum of Alexandria and the Lyceum of Athens. The 
 weight of his name protected the free thought of Aris- 
 totle at the Lyceum ; for the great teacher was con- 
 demned for blasphemy immediately after Alexander's 
 death. ^ The immense pecuniary aid and the thousands 
 of collaborators, which Pliny reports him to have given 
 Aristotle for the collection of scientific material, may be 
 an exaggeration, especially as his physical works show 
 slight acquaintance with Asiatic plants and animals, and 
 were probably written, in part at least, before Alexander's 
 campaigns ; but the story is true so far as this, — that the 
 Indian campaign, especially, was the source of a flood of 
 writings on physical geography and natural history.''^ At 
 his touch, harvests of historians, scholars, naturalists, mor- 
 alists, and generals sprang up on Iranian soil. Ptolemy 
 Soter, the regenerator of Egypt, one of the greatest of 
 sovereigns, whose glory consisted in carrying out Alexan- 
 der's system of freedom, mildness, and equity, and his love 
 of philosophy and letters, was his intimate friend, and 
 perhaps a near relative. A scholar, as well as statesman, 
 he wrote his biography, and was in every sense his best 
 successor; not least so in this, that, in conjunction with 
 Demetrius Phalereus, he planned and instituted the Mu- 
 seum of Alexandria, and made it the intellectual centre 
 of the age. 
 
 As the opener of the East to free government and scien- 
 tific study, Alexander might well arouse the enthusiasm of 
 his contemporaries ; and not less as the pioneer of letters, 
 preparing the way for Homer, yEschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, 
 Plato, and Aristotle. But there is a splendor of prophecy 
 not to be described, in the influences that flowed back from 
 this Iranian throne upon the Western world. 
 
 ^ Gillies, p. 74. 
 
 ^ See Blaiiiville: Histoire des Sciefices de V Organisation, i. 305. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 387 
 
 Arabia, India, Persia, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, were the 
 CEcumcnical Council to initiate these influences, centrint^ 
 in the purpose of this human Jove and the grander pur- 
 pose that wrought at once beyond and through his will. 
 Asia was not the mere corrupter of Greece, her Oriental 
 siren of luxury and slavery. By his radiant march through 
 Iran, and by the voyage of his admiral through the Indian 
 seas, — which he proposed to follow up by opening the 
 Euphrates and Persian Gulf, if not by circumnavigating 
 Arabia, and exploring the Euxine, — what an empire 
 of new knowledge, geographical, physical, ethnological, 
 stimulated every human faculty, and impelled to induc- 
 tive generalization as the only way of dealing with the 
 materials ! The spaces of Nature were doubled, and her 
 borders set forward from the Zagros Mountains to the 
 heart of India and the Scythian wilds of the North. 
 Science became encyclopedic, a seeker of classes and 
 wholes. Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Strabo, Pliny, and Ptol- 
 emy, became possible. It reached eastward, and the dis- 
 tant Ceylon was found to be an island only.^ It began to 
 conjecture inhabited lands in the Western sea that might 
 complete the circuit of the globe, to strike out universal 
 laws, to separate truth from mythology; and a wondrous 
 series of cosmical discoveries ensued.^ The commerce 
 opened between Alexandria and India, and the embassies 
 of the Seleucidae, brought Greek astronomy into the Hin- 
 du schools, themselves already flourishing.^ Greek terms 
 abounded; obligations to Greek teachers are confessed; 
 and the achievements of those apt scholars became in 
 turn the sources of astronomical knowledge to the Arabs 
 of Bagdad, by whom ancient science was passed down to 
 modern times. Still fertile in errors, as was natural in this 
 fresh expansion of its realm, the imagination received 
 
 1 Pliny: Natural History, ^\. 24. 2 Humboldt: Cosmos, ii. 147. 
 
 * Weber: History 0/ Indian Literature, p. 251. 
 
388 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 from the vast prospect of colossal mountains, varied cli- 
 mates, products, races, religions, which this man's eagle 
 eye traced out, an impulse unexampled in history. At 
 the same moment serious and free criticism began in the 
 necessity of testing traditional beliefs by comparison with 
 the new treasures brought by the higher authority of fact. 
 In his striking description of certain aspects of these con- 
 quests in relation to the study of the physical world, Hum- 
 boldt mentions the immense step taken, mainly through 
 Aristotle, in "the formation of a scientific language.'''^ 
 
 Most impressive of all the results of the Macedonian 
 conquests, and the spirit in which they were pursued, was 
 the inevitable suggestion of a universal citizenship in the 
 great republic of Humanity, whose common interests no 
 natural barriers could longer hide. The sublime outlook of 
 Stoicism ; its city of God ; its brotherhood of nations ; its 
 absolute trust in natural order; its regeneration of Roman 
 law by humanity and justice; its correction of Christian 
 other-worldliness by acceptance of human destiny, flowed 
 directly from the bivouacs of this great soldier on the 
 Iranian plains.^ 
 
 It does not belong to the plan of our work to enter into 
 the development of the historic causes and effects, which are 
 here affirmed only as bearing on our more extended theme, 
 of which they form but a section. Enough has been said 
 to show that the rapidity of these changes was a flash of 
 Iranian fire. It demonstrated also that Alexander was the 
 swift-moving focus of vast tendencies, of which his age was 
 the natural climate and soil. His campaigns were over in 
 
 ' Cosmos, ii. 149-165 (English edition). 
 
 2 No one has more strikingly recognized these tendencies in the very necessities of his- 
 toric cause and effect than Merivale in his little work, " The Con\'ersion of the Roman 
 Empire." Yet he has greatly marred the value of his testimony by depreciating these ten- 
 dencies of Nature in view of a supposed supernatural transformation of them in the jierson 
 of Jesus Christ. Nor does he, as it seems to me, appreciate Alexander's conscious purpose 
 in this unifying work. Lecture iii. 
 
 "Nearly all the most important Stoics before the Christian era belong by birth to Asia 
 Minor, to Svria, and to the islands of the Eastern Archipelago."— Zeller's Stoics, p. 37. 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 389 
 
 twelve years. And fifty years after his death, the city he 
 founded and laid out in the shape of his Macedonian cloak, 
 and made the representative of his purposes and his. name, 
 was the open gate of intellect, commerce, and faith, to a 
 new cycle of human growth. 
 
 There is no evidence to confirm the tradition that he died 
 by poison ; ^ but much reason to believe that Arrian is right 
 in saying that he foresaw that his successors would perform 
 his obsequies in blood.^ The magnificent funeral car moved 
 across the continents from Babylon to Egypt, bearing the 
 dead form of the master of civilizations to his rest beside 
 the sacred Nile ; ^ around it hovered the awe of myriads, 
 who believed, so says the tradition, that he still wore the 
 hue of life, still sat crowned and on his golden throne, and 
 was sure to smite to earth the impious one who should dare 
 to touch his Majesty. For nearly a thousand years the 
 cultus of his divinity survived in Egypt. Yet no picture 
 or statue remains.^ Other gods came, whose disciples 
 could endure no rival names. The pictures of Augustus 
 were put by Claudius in place of those of Alexander. 
 We shall not see that majestic statue, by Lysippus, which 
 was said to have made men tremble.^ The Christians 
 of Alexandria destroyed his tomb. But how slight is 
 what men can do to build or destroy a name, compared 
 with the work of ideas and principles that have ages for 
 their servants and history for their fruits ! 
 
 The ages of exclusiveness, national and religious, were 
 passing away. The communion of races made inevitable 
 a new historic birth. In Antioch and Alexandria and 
 Rome, Jew and Gentile, bond and free. Barbarian and 
 Greek, were now to know themselves as children of com- 
 mon relations, reaching beyond the borders of nations, con- 
 tinents, oceans, mountains, and deserts that had seemed 
 
 ' See Arrian, vii. 27. - Ibid., vii. 26. 
 
 2 Diodorus Siculus. * Sainte-Croix, p. 506. 
 
 6 Plutarch. See Sainte-Croix, p. ^gg 
 
390 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 the limits of the world. Nature, humanity, unity, brother- 
 hood, were syllables shaping on the winds, blow they 
 whence they would. Later Judaism, Christianity, and 
 Islam were to find their way prepared ; the universal ele- 
 ments were ready to bear these religious harvests, and law 
 and science and philosophy and all secular culture were 
 assured. Three hundred years had passed since Cyrus 
 turned the waters of the river of Babylon, when Alexan- 
 der left an empire to his successors, which added to the 
 Persian those worlds of intellectual promise, — Kgypt and 
 Greece. 
 
 Now again a mighty force of personal Will gathers and 
 directs the currents of progress through the ideal prestige 
 it can command. Other like forms of personal worship 
 follow ; for this was the condition of progress that opened 
 with the mind of Iran. But all were involved in what had 
 already been done. The veil that had hid the tribes of 
 the earth from each other had already been rent ; and the 
 light shone, east and west, over the whole heavens of 
 mind. 
 
III. 
 
 THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 
 
 TT 7HAT would have been the destiny of the Persian 
 ' ^ empire had Alexander lived to complete his plans 
 for making Babylon the organic centre of a new civilization, 
 and transmitting his magnificent prestige in this permanent 
 form, may be partially conjectured. His Oriental sympa- 
 thies, his constructive capacity, and that of the remarkable 
 group of thinkers and workers whom he had gathered 
 around him ; the vast antiquity of Asiatic traditions, and 
 their common allegiance to this focus of cultures ; the com- 
 mercial advantages of the Euphrates valley, and the long- 
 established lines of communication which gave Babylon a 
 commanding voice through the ancient world, — would 
 doubtless have preserved the continuity of the Persian State, 
 and concentrated upon that historic region much of the 
 intellectual and political significance which after the decline 
 of Greece fell to the lot of Alexandria and Rome. Helle- 
 nic wisdom, forsaking the ruined republics, and gathering 
 on its eastward track the splendid relics of Ionian culture, 
 would have brought thither its best philosophy and science 
 to mingle with the moral ardor and sensuous idealism of 
 Mazdean worship. The tribes of the East and the West 
 would have gone up to Alexander's Babylon with that 
 Iranian passion for heroic personality, common to Persian 
 and Greek, which would have united their jealous individu- 
 alities and sunk their feudal independence in the pride of 
 universal empire. Whether the corresponding demand for 
 religious unity, which was the all-controlling impulse of the 
 centuries succeeding Alexander, resulting in Neoplatonism 
 
394 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 and Christianity, would not, under these conditions, have 
 found its centre in an Aryan rather than a Semitic faith, and 
 drawn its symbohsm from the associations of Iran rather 
 than from those of Palestine and Arabia, is a question 
 not to be lightly answered in the negative. So plastic are 
 special religions to the forces of evolution, and so inter- 
 woven and mutually dependent did they become as a 
 result of the period to which we now refer, that the nat- 
 ural selection of one or another of them as a basis for the 
 continuities of man's spiritual progress depended very 
 much on such external elements as geographical location 
 and the set of social and political currents. Science will 
 not trace this selection, so far as it existed, to any extreme 
 difference in their spiritual quality or even in their doctrinal 
 form ; while it overwhelmingly disproves the claim of any 
 one race or religion to have been the sovereign factor of 
 the highest elements of our civilization. 
 
 The Dualism of Mazdeism, its internecine war of God 
 and Satan, its intolerance of infidel and hostile wills in the 
 name of purity, its energy of ethical motive and its enthu- 
 siasm for personal heroism, as well as its devotion to one 
 Supreme Person combining the powers of creation, preser- 
 vation, and destruction, were all directly in the same line 
 of religious development. Judaism and Christianity were, 
 each in its way, equally dualistic. The good and evil crea- 
 tions were arrayed against each other in the prophecies of 
 Isaiah and the Gospel of John as truly as in the Avesta of 
 Zoroaster. The monarchical God of Europe could have 
 been evolved from Ahuramazda, or the All-wise and 
 All-mighty, as well as from Jahveh, Allah, or the Abba 
 Father of Christianity. Doubtless the form in which the 
 want of the Iranian world in Alexander's time for such a 
 monarchical Will revealed in some visible or human way 
 for the world's deliverance would have been met, would 
 have differed from that in which Christianity met the same 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 395 
 
 demand three centuries later in the Httle province of the 
 Roman State. But we may say, with equal truth, that the 
 revival of the great Oriental monarchy by Alexander 
 might well have wrought changes in all Asia to the bor- 
 ders of the Great Sea, and in the relation of those States 
 to European history, which would have foreclosed the 
 Messianic tragedy preparing in the social, political, and 
 religious life of the Jewish people. Imagine the passion- 
 ate monotheism of those patriotic tribes put under the 
 fostering care of a new Cyrus and the spiritual provi- 
 dence of an idol-hating Ahura, instead of battling for its 
 rites, traditions, and holy places against the polytheism of 
 Greece and Rome. Imagine the faith of Ahuramazda 
 broadened by the confluence of civilizations, and the de- 
 velopment of Messianic Judaism drawn by his imperial 
 sway out of its exclusive nationality, and made impersonal 
 by prospects of moral and spiritual renovation for man- 
 kind, apart from the house of David and from visions of 
 the end of this world, — and it is easy to see how changed 
 would have been the historical relations and associations 
 of modern civilization, so that their lines would have run 
 back to quite other religious names and symbols of belief. 
 There was nothing in the Iranian deity which made such 
 world-influence impossible, and much that made it very 
 probable, in connection with the wonderful old city where 
 Jahveh himself was imbued with the larger life that was to 
 come of his loins. All Asia, from the Hindu Koh to the 
 river of Babylon, had submitted to the heroic personality 
 of Alexander, and might have found in the religious tra- 
 ditions of the empire a basis for those cosmopolitan 
 instincts which had long been working in the common 
 relations of the tribes to an earthly " king of kings." A 
 monarchical religion was desired that should fully recog- 
 nize the great ethical conflict of good and evil, and be 
 reconcilable with the liberty of States, of chiefs, of tribes, 
 
39^ POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 of traditions ; a god commanding by his ideal purity and 
 energy the devotion of races that worshipped heroic Will, 
 and believed in building a kingdom of heaven out of the 
 resources of this world. Behind all dualistic mythology, 
 magism, ritualism, spirit of conquest and sway, this was 
 the essence of the Mazdean faith, upon which in large 
 degree Alexander would have been forced to build his 
 empire. What he might have effected in associating it 
 with all future development, by union with the culture of 
 Greece, and the communion of races and beliefs, in the 
 city that had passed from Nebuchadnezzar to Cyrus, from 
 Bel to Ahuramazda, and opened her gates to the humani- 
 ties of Homer and the wisdom of Aristotle, is therefore 
 on the whole not to be determined from a merely Semitic 
 or even Christian point of view. 
 
 But Alexander's purposes died with his last breath ; and 
 the Macedonian princes who divided the yet unorganized 
 empire neither cherished those purposes nor were capable 
 of fulfilling them. Iranian religion, therefore, lost its dis- 
 tinguishable hold on the course of history, though not its 
 real influence, as will hereafter appear. The river of Maz- 
 deism runs mainly underground for five hundred years, and 
 is hardly heard of till the day when the Sassanian Arde- 
 shir summoned it again to the throne of the East. But 
 was a revival so wonderful ever known, before or since? 
 
 A more complete disappearance than that of the ancient 
 faith of Iran during the reigns of the Macedonian and Par- 
 thian kings can hardly be imagined. The national legend 
 takes no account of this period. Firdusi merely says that 
 after Iskander " light, turbulent, and bold princes seized on 
 the divided empire, and were called kings of the tribes ; " 
 then passes directly to the birth of Ardeshir, whose origin 
 he traces to Sasan, a scion of the native royal family, the 
 ancestor of a tribe of shepherds, poor and straggling. 
 Brought up by Babek, king at Istakhar, this descendant 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE, 
 
 of Isfendiyar reopens the heroic and patriotic myth. Of 
 the Seleucide period, history has preserved Httle but a 
 wild phantasmagoria of shifting boundaries and fortunes, 
 presented by the struggles of half-a-dozen princes 
 for the mastery of a dissevered empire. Of the condi- 
 tion of the Iranian population under Seleucus Nicator, 
 the greatest of these princes, whose dominions were al- 
 most conterminous with the old Persian empire, we know 
 nothing. The Persian chroniclers may well ignore this 
 whole Seleucide period and that of the Arsacidae which 
 succeeded it. The Greek colonists took no interest in Maz- 
 deism, though all their native writers testify to the great 
 influence which Oriental astrology (or asteroscopy), under 
 the name of Magism, was exerting on the Hellenic mind. 
 Notices of Persian Dualism in the writings of Theopompus 
 and Plutarch,^ of Pliny ^ and the Alexandrians, and the 
 increasing tendency of all the Greeks to refer the begin- 
 ning of their philosophic culture and the wisdom of their 
 thinkers, old and new, to Zoroaster and his Magi, testify^ 
 to the profound interest created not only by the com- 
 panions of Alexander, but by the whole intercourse of the 
 East and West after the fall of the Persian empire, in a 
 religion which was really of their own brain and blood, 
 but more suggestive than their own of vast and subtile 
 forces awaiting the touch of the understanding and the 
 will. Rut great as was the world-historical interest of 
 this period for the Mazdean faith, it depended, like the 
 expansion of every other religion, upon failure and death 
 on its own native soil, upon the transmission of its life 
 into new forms and symbols, and the reaping of its har- 
 vests by other hands. The Macedonian strangers in Iran 
 had little interest in the ethical earnestness of the Avesta, 
 
 * Plutarch: Isis and Osiris. ^ Pliny: Natural History, xxx. 
 
 ^ For a full account of these testimonies, see Rapp (Zeiischr. d. DeiUsch. Alorgeid. 
 Gesellsch. xix. i-iy)- 
 
398 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 and were doubtless of a more easy tolerance towards 
 other forms of faith. The religion of the Parthians, who 
 soon succeeded them, was a cultus of the elements, of 
 the Turano-Scythic sort. Their worship of ancestors, of 
 guardian genii, and of the heavenly bodies was some- 
 what advanced by a mixture of certain Mazdean names 
 and associations, but had little regard for others, since 
 they raised temples and statues to Mithra, and carried 
 images of their gods about as teraphim.^ It was said of 
 them by the Armenian writers, that they let the fire of 
 Ormuzd go out ; and their priesthood may have been like 
 those Median Magi who conspired against Cambyses, and 
 sought to supplant the priests {Athravmio) of Ahura. But 
 they were certainly far from the intolerance of either party 
 in that earlier war. The ease with which Ardeshir accom- 
 plished the restoration of Mazdeism after four hundred 
 years of Parthian rule, his immediate success in gathering 
 a host of Mobads (eighty thousand, it is said) from all 
 parts of the empire for this purpose, proves the full lib- 
 erty of the old faith to maintain itself among the peo- 
 ple through the reign of this foreign dynasty, and that it 
 was in fact the popular religion of their dominions. 
 
 These Mobads, or Magi, whose name is never men- 
 tioned in the old Avesta where the priests are Athravas, 
 must have been either the representatives of the old Aves- 
 tan priesthood, rising all at once from a state of semi- 
 repression under the warlike Parthian tribes,^ or else the 
 Medo-Turanian priesthood must have been so modified by 
 contact with Mazdeism as to be readily transformed into 
 revivalists of Ahura at the summons of his apostle. The 
 power of these Magi over the people, or as a social element, 
 must have been maintained at its height during this whole 
 period, since the revolution of Ardeshir was evidently 
 
 ' Justin, xli. 3. Joseplnis : Ji-iuish Antiquities, xviii. 5, 9. 
 ' Gibbon : Koiiian Eiit/'ire, cliap. viil. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 399 
 
 an uprising of the Persian masses in the name of Ahura ; 
 and their representatives, the Mobads, were assigned the 
 foremost place in the new order of things, and became the 
 functionaries of a compulsory State religion. They col- 
 lected and restored the old Avesta, and translated it from 
 their original ancient Bactrian into the Pehlevi, or current 
 language of the (Parthian) empire. It is not easy to see 
 how the Mazdean faith could have survived in western 
 Iran without the aid of its sacred books ; yet if the old 
 Bactrian had been comprehended by the people, why was 
 it necessary to translate them into Pehlevi? There is no 
 way of accounting for the facts, but to suppose that there 
 were other methods of transmitting the doctrine and rites 
 in the absence of original records, — such as oral traditions, 
 fragmentary collections of hymns and precepts, embody- 
 ing the substance of the faith, immemorial forms inter- 
 woven with social and domestic life, and including all, the 
 undying love of a people for beliefs that were the natural 
 outcome of their inward life. Here was a force of resist- 
 ance capable of preventing any foreign influence from 
 doing more than to overlay this natural religion with new 
 details without altering its spirit, though the language of 
 its records had become obsolete. The later portions of 
 the Avesta, with their elaborate ritualism, are sufficient 
 evidence of such foreign accessions and changes during 
 the period preceding Ardeshir, which the presence of the 
 old Gathas at least would have foreclosed. The heroic 
 national legends, as collected by Firdusi as late as the 
 Mahometan period, show how much of the oldest my- 
 thology of the faith is still traceable in strong outline 
 through the whelming vicissitudes of thirteen centuries. 
 
 Such was the hold of the law of Ahuramazda upon 
 the people of Iran through these five hundred years of 
 foreign dominion. If the " fire " of that deity " had be- 
 come extinct," it was not because the Parthian had directly 
 
400 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 supplanted it by other fires, though he had lost his sacred 
 regard for it sufficiently to burn the dead even,^ but be- 
 cause the rule of a tribe of Turanian nomads, living on 
 horseback, and devoted to aggressive warfare, had discour- 
 aged those national and personal traditions on whose au- 
 thority it had come to rest, and by whose exclusiveness it 
 had been fed. The revolution proved that the religious 
 conscience of the Mazdcans had not been suppressed. 
 Had it even been outraged ? To the honor of their 
 Scythic origin,^ the Parthians were tolerant of all fires of 
 faith. The Jews grew strong enough in Babylon and 
 Nisibis, under their eyes, to rebel against them.^ Jahveh, 
 Ormuzd, Christ, even Bel and Buddha, dwelt side by side 
 with the Parthian Mithra, and the worship of teraphim with 
 that of the sun and moon. In Osrhoene, Christianity was 
 a State religion. Edessa was a fountain of Christian learn- 
 ing. The Parthian in Persia knew no difference of Greek 
 and Jew. His coins bore Greek legends and Greek gods. 
 At no other time or place in their history did the Jews live 
 in greater authority and luxury than in his shadow. In 
 his reign the materials for the Babylonian Talmud were 
 gathered in quiet research. Everywhere in the empire 
 sects competed and missionaries proselyted without of- 
 fence. In Harran the Sabeans served many gods, and 
 struck a root which held till the tenth century. If, as 
 has been thought,* the Parthians sought to make every 
 householder a priest, and thus to discourage special priest- 
 hoods, this very liberalism may have offended the Mazde- 
 ans. But the coins of the empire at that very time bore 
 fire-altars, and the priests of Ahura were ready for the 
 call of Ardeshir.^ The very names of these Parthian kings 
 were mostly old Persian.*^ 
 
 1 Herodian, iv. 30. 2 gtrabo, Justin, Arian, Gibbon, Niebuhr. 
 
 2 Josephus : Bell. Jud. i. 11, et seq. * Gobineau : Histoire des Parses. 
 B Gobineau : Histoire des Perses, ii. 6, 7. 
 
 8 Roth {Zeitschr. d. Dcutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xiii. 415, 416). 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 40I 
 
 It is probable that, as the Parthian kings dropped the 
 Scythian cap for the tall tiara of the Persians, so they 
 accepted the Magism of their subjects as they found it, 
 and allowed it considerable influence, — since the numbers 
 of the priesthood in their time were very great, their 
 possessions large, and they exercised a check on the royal 
 autocracy.^ The Parthians, though they had no art of 
 any value, were by no means uncivilized, and became apt 
 pupils of the Persian and the Greek. Mithridates turned 
 upon the Scythic hordes, from whose bosom his line had 
 come, and drove them from Iran. The race had large 
 sympathies, and, like the Macedonians, sought unity on 
 the basis of a religious freedom more liberal than Rome. 
 They preserved, in this respect, the traditions of Alex- 
 ander's policy, as well as foreshadowed the larger unities 
 of modern times. It is, then, impossible that they should 
 have dreamed of extinguishing the fires of Ahuramazda; 
 but it is equally impossible that this very latitudinarianism 
 should not have offended the rooted pride of ]\Iazdeism, 
 mortified its zeal, and provoked its jealousy; especially 
 as its confessors were allowed too much freedom to be- 
 come disheartened about their future destiny. 
 
 The energy of the revival, and its intense intolerance, 
 were precisely what was to be expected from a religion 
 absorbed in the worship of a supreme Divine Will. The 
 old strength of Agni and Indra was in this flame that 
 leaped from its fallen altars, where it had smouldered for 
 five hundred years, and soared to its native heaven of abso- 
 lute sway. What changes the faith had undergone during 
 this long period, it is as yet difficult exactly to determine. 
 But the Pehlevi literature of the Sassanians shows a large 
 intermixture at least of Semitic beliefs,^ with which, in the 
 above respect, it could readily affiliate. 
 
 1 Rawlinson : Sixth Oriental Motiarcky. 
 
 2 See Spiegel : Eranisdie Alterihumskunde, iii. 
 
 26 
 
402 rOLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 The interference of the Parthian kings with Iranian po- 
 Htical institutions was equally unimportant The Parthian 
 rebellion was the work of nobles, discontented at the loss 
 of personal liberties under the Seleucide rule; and their 
 success brought personal rights to the front to such a 
 degree that royalty itself was but a part of the nobility.-^ 
 In respect to the powers of local chiefs, the Perso-Parthian 
 State might be called Iranian. Originally a free tribe, — 
 free from the time of Cyrus down, now allied to Alexan- 
 der, and now arrayed against him, — the Parthians were 
 swift to revolt from Hellenic satraps (250 B.C.) in the true 
 spirit of old Iran. Their real sway over the empire began 
 with Mithridatcs I. (163 B.C.), a conqueror worthy to be 
 compared with Cyrus and Alexander, and was conducted 
 on principles familiar to the native tribes. High-spirited 
 nobles — a part of them Magi, and holding priestly office — 
 elected the kings (called ©eol, and brothers of the Sun and 
 Moon), and tempered despotism by their independence.^ 
 The provinces were viceroyalties, and the social consti- 
 tution, like the old Persian, was on a feudal basis, — each 
 State retaining, in most respects, its local forms of govern- 
 ment. The numerous cities founded by Alexander's Greek 
 colonists preserved their liberties. The local rulers coined 
 their own money. Persia itself had its own king and its 
 own customs. Coins have been found, representing Or- 
 muzd and the Mazdean religion, w^hich good reasons 
 have been given for ascribing to rulers of southern Persia 
 during this period.^ In every city there was a king, and 
 it was in this sense that the Parthian first called himself, 
 with literal truth, " king of kings," a title assumed by 
 every master of the Iranian State. These institutions were 
 inherent in the soil, learned from Persia and Greece. The 
 
 ^ Carr^: L'Ancten. Orient ii. 364. 
 * Rawlinson : Sixth Oriental Monarchy, p. 419. 
 
 ' See the description of coins in Pehlevi legends, described by Levy (Zeitschr. d. Dcntsch. 
 Morgenl. Geselhch., xxi. 440). 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 403 
 
 Parthian was himself their product, and he was not the 
 first. Bactria had already, led by its Hellenic rulers, 
 thrown off allegiance to the Seleucidae, and revived its 
 ancient glory. Alexander's death was the signal for local 
 revolt. Even northern India hastened to refuse obedi- 
 ence to his successors.^ Each of these States had its own 
 hero or semi-divinity, a centre of enthusiasm for nobles 
 and people, of a local pride and self-reliance, of which 
 Firdusi's epic gives the afterglow. It is curious to note 
 that, notwithstanding the great variety of races included in 
 the Persian empire, the names of most of these men of 
 ideal will were Iranian. 
 
 If the Macedonian or Parthian kings could have become 
 legitimate centres of the hero-worship so natural to their 
 subjects, and made it a national instead of a localized 
 instinct, they would have fulfilled the great opportunity 
 opened by the conquests of Alexander. Some of them 
 had commanding qualities, — Seleucus Nicator in the 
 Macedonian line, Mithridates I. in the Parthian. But a 
 succession of sanguinary conflicts, forever undecided, 
 ruined every prestige of personal power ; there was no 
 towering personality, no natural king of the world, among 
 these ambitious rivals. And so the States of Iran fell 
 apart into their own natural position as individual atoms 
 of Will. But more than that, there was no representative 
 of the ancient war of Good against Evil ; no son of Ahura 
 to summon the masses of Iran with the old Zoroastrian 
 warnings and commands ; no supreme ethical principle 
 embodied in royal lives that lived and died for its sake, 
 r and passed on its immortality, in a line like that of the 
 old Avestan saviours of mankind. There were merely so 
 many warring wills ; and mere will-force, without the flame 
 of ethical law for its divinity, could make no permanent 
 impression on the Iranian mind. And if it is the experi- 
 
 1 Justin, XV. 4. 
 
404 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 ence of all subsequent ages of Aryan and Semitic develop- 
 ment, that personal Will, as ultimate authority, can never 
 make a permanent government, this is only because such 
 will can never become the permanent basis for philoso- 
 phical or religious belief. Political stability, though in- 
 consistent with established creeds, yet rests directly on 
 the religious nature ; and the natural religion of Iran 
 demanded either a succession of wills great enough to 
 represent its living God, or else a system of ethical prin- 
 ciples and spiritual beliefs embodying his enduring right- 
 eousness. The Seleucidc kings aimed to satisfy the first 
 of these alternatives. They aped divinity, and were adored 
 with sacrifices, and put their images among the gods. 
 They counted time from the dates of their accession to 
 the throne. They worked effectively at building cities, 
 opening trade, and circulating Greek culture, and made 
 many admirable laws. But these claims had small value 
 in Iranian eyes in comparison with the consecrated local 
 instincts and personal loyalties which the foreigner over- 
 rode. Alexander had wisely put local opportunities into 
 native hands ; but the satraps of the Selcucidae were 
 Greek. The subject States saw their tributes squandered 
 by luxurious and sensual courts, by men of foreign lan- 
 guage and belief Domestic feuds and family tragedies 
 were bad arguments to prove the divinity of a line of 
 kings ; so were rival ambitions, and the cruelties of jeal- 
 ousy and fear. The old indigenous feudalism, based on 
 a heroic impulse, sought its natural king; and so the old 
 experience was repeated in the case of the Greek empire 
 in Asia, which we have already described as befalling the 
 empires which preceded it on the soil of Iran. Individual 
 States, such as Parthia and Bactria, the mother-land of the 
 faith, broke away from the central government, leading 
 their Greek satraps, where these were competent, first into 
 independence, and then, as the substitution of Bactrian for 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 405 
 
 Greek legends on the coins clearly shows, into gradual 
 adoption of the local traditions and life.^ And finally 
 Parthia, remotest of these States which had grown by such 
 local training, and so little known on its Turanian borders 
 that no Greek had thought of paying heed to its growth, 
 puts forth a natural master of men, seizes the unwieldy 
 empire, — as the Persian, and before him the Mede, had 
 done, — and proves again that on this soil new energy was 
 always to be supreme. 
 
 There was much in the Parthians to rouse the hero- 
 worship of Iran. They were bold riders, and made the 
 bow and arrow historic. The crescent and star on their 
 standards were significant emblems to the " fire-worship- 
 pers," and anticipated those of great nations and religions. 
 Doubtless the military energy which gave them the mas- 
 tery of the Persian empire from the Euphrates to the Hindu 
 Koh, and which was the only power capable of checking 
 the advance of Rome to world-dominion, — conquerors of 
 Antony and Crassus, and during their whole existence 
 the terror of the Roman soldier, to whom a Parthian cam- 
 paign was the saddest of tidings, — was not entirely due to 
 inherent qualities in the race. It was encouraged by the 
 natural difficulties in the way of invading their country, 
 and, aided by the effects of their guerilla warfare on horse- 
 back, a novelty to their European foes. But they had 
 really great valor and endurance; they were as terrible 
 with the long lance as with the distant arrow. Crassus 
 was told by fugitives that they could neither be escaped 
 when they pursued, nor caught when they fled; and that 
 their strange arrows reached their mark before they 
 seemed to have been shot.^ Theirs was the great historic 
 function of preserving the self-respect of Asia, and of 
 holding over the traditions of the Persian empire till its 
 glorious revival under the Sassanide kings. Without 
 
 I Lassen: Ind. Alterth. ii. 311. 2 Plutarch: Vila. Crassi. 
 
406 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 them the strong organizing hand of Rome would have 
 crushed the freer feudahsm of Iran, and that splendid 
 literary and artistic era would probably never have dawned. 
 Intolerant in their faith, the native Sassanide dynasty in- 
 herited an earnest and spirited people, whose idealism had 
 been allowed free growth under the Parthian rulers, so that 
 the requisite element was provided for counteracting the 
 hard, practical, and political realism of Rome. 
 
 It was reported of the Parthian kings that they always 
 respected the sacred rights of ambassadors, and never vio- 
 lated their treaties ; that they were on the whole kind to 
 their prisoners of war, gave asylum to fugitives, and ad- 
 mitted foreigners to offices of trust.^ Germanicus, one of 
 the best of the Romans, was in especial honor among them.^ 
 Their dynastic broils, on which the Roman historian Taci- 
 tus dwells, were at least proofs of remarkable individual 
 force. He also says of the people, that they were constantly 
 quarrelling with their princes, and regretting the loss of 
 them when they had been expelled. These kings have the 
 usual tragic record of crimes which belongs to all the dy- 
 nasties of the time ; but, in comparison with that of the Ro- 
 man C.'Esars, all Parthian enormities become respectable. 
 
 The condition of the Parthian empire in the early part 
 of the third century \i. C. prepared the way for the Sas- 
 sanian revolution. Persia had lost its imperial name, 
 divided into eighteen independent States ; but the prov- 
 ince of Pars, which had been the mother of that name, 
 was most thoroughly alive to its heroic and sacred tra- 
 ditions, and persuaded that a great future awaited them 
 out of the political anarchy and disintegration of the 
 Arsacide State. The theory that the native uprising was 
 due in large degree to the influence of the Semitic ele- 
 ment of the population, and in pursuance of Semitic in- 
 
 1 Rawlinson : Sixth Monarchy, pp. 413, 426. 
 ' See Tacitus, ii. 58. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 407 
 
 terests,^ has no other apparent ground than the religious 
 intolerance that characterized it ; and this was so decided 
 in the Mazdean faith as to need no aid from the narrow- 
 ness of the Semitic. The disciples of Ahura were not 
 likely to be gratified by the easy secularism of the Par- 
 thian. In their eyes, probably his heaviest oppression 
 consisted in his latitudinarian treatment of creeds. They 
 could not bear to see other priesthoods put on an equality 
 with their own ; for the worship of Ahura was the service 
 of an all-commanding exclusive Will. Gobineau's idea, 
 that the rebellion was an insurrection of the peasantry 
 {jaqucTie) directed against turbulent nobles, may or may 
 not be partly true ; but the utter extermination of the 
 Parthians by Ardeshir Babegan shows that only religious 
 zeal could have been the prime mover of the war. And 
 this motive, aided by the free communication between all 
 parts of Iran, and brought under the influence of a 
 common personal admiration for the great qualities of 
 Ardeshir, broadened into a patriotic ardor, which effaced 
 local jealousies, and re-created the empire out of the 
 ver}' essence of its historic life. The old religious organ- 
 ization of the empire, in accordance with the Zoroas- 
 trian Amesha-gpentas, was not only preserved under the 
 Sassanian regime, in "seven great families," clothed with 
 exalted and hereditary rights, but constituted a thread 
 of political continuity which extends from the early 
 Achaemenidae down to the end of the native Persian 
 State. 2 So the old lower-landed nobility (i?////('iz/^^/^) were 
 still administrators of local functions in the time of the 
 Mussulman conquest.^ The five classes of this native 
 aristocracy resisted all processes of centralization, and kept 
 alive the local independence so dear to the Iranian mind. 
 
 1 Gobineaii : Histoirc des Perses, ii. 604. 
 
 ^ See Nbldeke : Tnbari, p. 437. (Uber die inncren Verlidltn. d. Sassanidenreicks.) 
 
 •* Ibid., 440. Also Masudi : Meadows 0/ Gold, v. 33. 
 
408 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Against all these individual elements the Sassanian kings 
 had a hard struggle to maintain an authority won only by 
 the revolutionary energy of Ardeshir ; and their success 
 was due not so much to any power they possessed to dis- 
 turb the traditional organism of the State, as to the influ- 
 ence of personal character, and the seizure of special 
 opportunities to make good their private interests and 
 gratify their desires. The clergy grew, under the religious 
 earnestness of the dynasty, into a close and highly organ- 
 ized body, and formed a kind of " State within the State," 
 whose power was often leagued with that of the nobles 
 against the king, and who knew as well as any other priest- 
 hood how to persecute and rule. The empire, divided 
 into prefectures, was loosely related to the central power; 
 the army, a cumbrous feudal mechanism, was under the im- 
 mediate control of the higher nobility. Nevertheless, the 
 kings had the old prestige of Iranian will-worship. They 
 called themselves " gods," or rather " the seed of God," 
 and took the names of national deities, not exactly as iden- 
 tified with them, but as claiming to be under their special 
 care.^ The common hope was to restore the old religious 
 traditions. It was by representing these that Ardeshir 
 rose at once to the place of Cyrus in the hero-worship of 
 his people ; so that Gibbon thinks he must have been 
 himself a Magus. Appealing at once to the popular in- 
 stincts, he superseded the local chiefs. The revival was 
 essentially democratic, so far as this was possible in an 
 Oriental State. The popular element, thus revealed in 
 Mazdeism, appeared in various ways. The native legends 
 make Ardeshir the son of a common shepherd, soldier, 
 astrologer, or laborer, though descended from the great 
 line of kings that ran back to the mythical Isfendiyar ; ^ 
 and the impoverishment that had befallen this royal race 
 
 1 Nbldeke : Tabari's History of Sassanides, pp. 451, 452. 
 
 2 Masudi ; also Firdiisi. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 409 
 
 was the mythic expression of the long eclipse of the Persian 
 State. The last discrowned Sassan had served a wealthy 
 person named Babek/ whose daughter he married, and 
 their son was Ardeshir Babegan.^ These humble rela- 
 tions of the new royalty were justified by the popular 
 nature of his institutions. " He allowed no intermediate 
 power," says Gibbon, " between himself and the people." 
 The local chiefs had to yield to his personal sway. He 
 deprived the satraps of excessive powers, and brought a 
 standing army to hold them in obedience. The chroniclers 
 prove at least his fame as a wise and just ruler, when they 
 ascribe to him sentences like these : " No power without 
 an army; no army without money; no money without 
 agriculture ; no agriculture without justice." " A king 
 should be a father; but without religion he is a tyrant; 
 and for a people to be without religion is simply mon- 
 strous." " The worst of kings is he w^ho is feared by the 
 rich and not by the bad."^ "Four qualities are indispen- 
 sable to kings : a natural magnanimity ; goodness of heart ; 
 firmness to repress social disorder; and justice enlightened 
 enough to give no occasion to any loyal subject to fear for 
 his life, his honor, or his estate." * 
 
 Burning to restore the ancient faith and freedom, Ar- 
 deshir pushes his way to high office in his native Pars, 
 refuses to be superseded, and the whole province backs 
 him in his revolt. He defeats and slays Artaban, the 
 Parthian king, in the battle of Hormuz ; and, after Oriental 
 fashion, strengthens his position by marrying the king's 
 daughter. Imperilled by the ambition of his brother and 
 his wife, he puts them out of the way; and, apparently 
 
 1 Or Papak. In the inscriptions he is called Sap or "king." Others say he was the son 
 of a n'lble, and revolted. 
 
 - Noldeke's translation of Tabari's History of Sassanides, p. 34. Tabari gives the legends 
 about Ardeshir : his predicted sway, his slaying the petty kings, his motive for avenging the 
 murder of Darius. Trover's note on p. 105. Dabistan, vol. i. Rawlinson : Seventh Ori- 
 ental ]\To>iarchy, pp. 30-32. 
 
 s Firdusi. * Bernard : Chroniques Orientates, p. 99. 
 
41 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 shrinking from no severity necessary to make secure his 
 throne, proceeds to lay the foundations of the grandest 
 epoch of Persian nationahty. 
 
 Ardeshir is regarded by the Persians as entitled to a 
 still more enduring glory. Their traditional code, the 
 basis of their civil polity for many ages, was his work ; 
 their lost and scattered religious books came down re- 
 covered, reconstructed, given to the people through his 
 pious hands. El Masudi, the Moslem writer, says " the 
 satrapies were in anarchy, after Alexander's death, till Ar- 
 deshir united the empire, restored order, established re- 
 ligion, advanced agriculture, preparing the way for the 
 greater prophet sent of God to destroy every infidel 
 creed. ^ P'irdusi tells us that he organized labor, forbade 
 bribery, enforced good administration, enjoined forbear- 
 ance in war. and mercy to the defeated foe ; that he estab- 
 lished schools and altars in every street, suffered none to 
 remain in want, exhorted his son Hormazd to obey God 
 and seek refuge in him alone. His administration, which 
 promised equal laws, personal security, and suppression of 
 feudal tyrannies, was doubtless a mighty revolution, so far 
 as the old aristocratic nobles were concerned, many of 
 whom were driven out of Persia proper into Seistan, where 
 the Afghan clans still represent the old jealous hate of cen- 
 tralized government. Though labor was freed from many 
 galling exactions, the feudatories were by no means extin- 
 guished, and the people, brought directly under the strong 
 hand of ro}^alty, were subjected to strict sumptuary laws 
 and stern religious disciplines. It is charged that, while 
 destroying the great nobles who endangered the throne, 
 Ardeshir not only retained a noble class distinctl)' marked 
 off from the masses, but held to the necessity of a per- 
 manently poor class, as a durable basis fof the political 
 
 1 Meadows of Gold, chap xvii. Malcolm : History of Persia. Carre L''Ancien 
 Orient, ii. 365. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 411 
 
 structure.^ Many cruelties are ascribed to his penal legis- 
 lation, while he is credited with many mitigations of older 
 customs. 
 
 But whatever merits entered into his system, it was cer- 
 tainly the union of Church and State in the most aggressive 
 form. The sentiment, already quoted as ascribed to him, 
 that a people without religious institutions is a monstrous 
 form of society, meant a great council of priests, in whom 
 was vested direct control over the descent of property, over 
 police and private affairs, and who had the principal voice, 
 through their chief, in determining what were the last in- 
 structions of the king before his death concerning the 
 succession to the throne, which could only be filled by a 
 sworn servant of Ahura.^ In an empire which for cen- 
 turies had been the home and the debating-ground of 
 religions (of Mazdeism, Buddhism, Hellenism, and Christi- 
 anity), he let loose the hounds of a merciless intolerance, — 
 the old Avestan hate of the unbeliever in Ahura, the fierce 
 exclusiveness that lurks in the worship of a monarchical 
 will. He destroyed every graven image, trampled out 
 every foreign cult, and put his host of Mobads at the head 
 of the State. Till the Arab came to substitute for Mazde- 
 ism a god and prophet as jealous as its own, the law of 
 Ahura was the government of Iran. Here and there a 
 Sassanian king was great enough to bring out its human- 
 ities rather than its fanatic zeal ; but most of the line were 
 persecutors. The chronicles tell us that Ardeshir com- 
 manded his Mobads to provide one of their number who 
 should " divest himself of the body, and bring intelligence 
 of heaven and hell." Hence the Vision of Ardai-Viraf, 
 who is selected out of forty thousand, as the one sinless 
 saint, to receive the revelation in sleep. The work whereof 
 
 1 Gobineaa : Histoire des Perses, ii. p. 626, 627. 
 
 ^ Nbldeke (Tabari, p. 2^) records him as having fulfilled an oath of his ancestor Sassan to 
 destroy every Arsacide. Noldeke thinks he is greatly overrated, and was a cruel, ambitious 
 despot, p. 8. 
 
412 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 this 'Story is the mythical explanation is in substance pre- 
 served, and combines the two opposite elements of the 
 Avestan faith to which we have referred. Led through all 
 the spheres by guardian angels of the Avesta, and with 
 performance of its sacred rites, this older Dante beholds 
 in types of sense the rewards and punishments of Mazdean 
 futurity. Amidst the delights of heaven are the spirits of 
 all who have observed the solemn festivals, — the priests 
 and their attendants, the heroes of the faith, the souls of 
 shepherds and husbandmen, and makers of gardens and 
 fertilizing streams. In fetid winds and Avaters of hell, in 
 night and cold, tormented by demons, and horrible food, 
 are not only shedders of innocent blood, slanderers, ex- 
 tortioners, sensualists, hypocrites and liars, defraudcrs of 
 labor and oppressors of the poor, betrayers of trusts, 
 but breakers of the ritual observances and laws of purifica- 
 tion, even those who have wept for the dead, or slayers of 
 four-footed animals, such as water-dogs, and in general 
 all who have befriended those hostile to the faith. ^ A 
 more extended version of the book shows it intended 
 to announce that all existing religions but the Mazdean 
 were inventions of the enemy, and to embody the pur- 
 pose of the revival, which was to put an end to the long- 
 continued ferment of differing creeds in Iran.^ 
 
 But if such was its purpose, the multiplication of beliefs 
 which followed it, and the profound influence of the Sassa- 
 nian empire on the development both of Christianity and 
 Islam, show that the native energy of Mazdeism could not 
 be confined to these destructi\'e channels. And we are 
 disposed to think that the work of Ardeshir was essen- 
 tially constructive ; that it supplied the concentration of 
 forces, political and religious, needed to counterbalance 
 
 ' See Dabistan, i. 2S3-304. Arda-i-Viraf is mentioned in the later Yeshts of the Avesta, 
 and his work is beheved to have been sent by Nushirvan, in the sixth century, as a kind of 
 Mazdean Bible, to all the provincial governors of the empire. (Ibid., 2S5.) 
 
 ^ Gobineau : HUtoire des Perses, ii. 630. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 413 
 
 similar forces, — at least equally exclusive and tyrannical, 
 — by whose rapid organization in the Western world the 
 faith and freedom of Asia were alike threatened with 
 destruction. 
 
 The military and political energy of Ardeshir was more 
 than rivalled by the reign of his successor, Shapur I., in 
 whom all the pride of the Assyrian and the world-ambition 
 of the Achaemenidan were renewed. Shapur avenges the 
 East upon the West. He defies Rome, devastates her 
 provinces, defeats her armies on their own soil, drags her 
 emperor in triumph to Ctesiphon, his Persian capital, gives 
 her legions a new general, and clothes an obscure fugitive 
 from Antioch with the imperial name. The inscriptions 
 give no support to the story of shocking barbarities in- 
 flicted on the captive Valerian.^ An immense irrigating 
 system of canals, and a dike twenty feet broad and twelve 
 hundred feet long, built to turn the Karun upon the plains 
 around a city of his own creation, were monuments of his 
 devotion to Ahura's law, — another grand type for Iranian 
 hero-worship, which did its best to make him immor- 
 tal in stone. There stands his statue, a colossal image 
 twenty feet high, hewn out of the natural rock, of noble 
 proportions, the hand resting on the sword.^ That tower- 
 ing head-gear, with eagle's Avings poising the globe in air, 
 speaks the true Shahan-shah, — the king aspiring to god- 
 hood by right of will. And again the sculptures show 
 
 * According to Firdusi, Shapur, visiting Roum (Ctesiphon), was taken by the emperor when 
 under the influence o£ wine, sewed in the skin of an ass, and thrown into prison, whence he 
 was delivered by a young girl of Iranian descent, who swears to keep his secret by everything 
 sacred in all existing religions, and by her love and fear for the Lord of Iran. She softens 
 the ass-skin with milk, and they escape together. When the emperor in his turn is defeated 
 and taken prisoner, Shapur revenges himself by cutting otT his ears, piercing his nose, and cast- 
 ing him into prison ; while the people of Roum refuse to recognize him, his name is accursed, 
 his altars are cast down, his bishop's crosses and girdles burned. " Roum and Canoudj differ 
 no more, for the voice of the Messiah's faith is dead " (Mohl's Firdusi, v. 465.) The un- 
 historical character of this legend is clear enough. Tabari celebrates his virtues (Nbldeke, 
 PP- 3'-33), among them his distribution of treasures to the poor on his accession, and his 
 deference to the claims of his nobles. 
 
 ^ See Rawlinson : Seventh Oriental Monarchy, p. 605. 
 
414 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 him riding in triumph, holding a conquered Caesar with 
 one arm while he guides his steed with the other, the em- 
 bassies of nations on their knees around him, pleading for 
 mercy or for ransom for the royal captive, it would seem, 
 in vain. How these Persians seized the historic value of 
 his achievement, lavishing upon it such munificence of 
 art as that of the great tablet representing his triumph by 
 a hundred and fifty figures, animal and human ! Their 
 colossal carving delighted in the theme of the royal sons 
 of Ahura charging the children of Ahriman on steeds full 
 of nervous power, kings dead and still beneath their feet, 
 or Ahriman himself grovelling in chains before them. 
 Never was the heroic ideal of Mazdeism so fulfilled as 
 in this Sassanian line. They more than made good the 
 terrible prestige won by Parthian arms; holding Cocsar 
 after C^sar at bay, carrying one away captive, annihilating 
 the splendid army of a second, and defeating a third, 
 alternating defeat with victory, for centuries the only coun- 
 terpoise to the power that was to rule the world at last. 
 Gibbon describes it as the height of the Emperor Julian's 
 ambition, " despising the trophies of a Gothic victory, to 
 chastise the haughty nation " which, as he had said in his 
 satire on the Caesars, had so defied the Roman arms that 
 in a war of three hundred years they had not subdued a 
 single province of its dominion.^ But the chastisement 
 fell upon his own head, and he died amidst his routed and 
 panic-stricken army, retreating from the desperate courage 
 of a people who dared to sacrifice all they possessed that 
 the invader might be fought with famine and fire, if heroic 
 swords should fail.^ 
 
 Shapur II., the conqueror of Julian and his magnificent 
 Roman and Arabian army, was as great a general as the 
 first of his name. In his youth he delivered Iran from 
 
 ^ Gibbon, xxiv. 
 
 2 Gibbon's noble chapter on the expedition of Julian. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 415 
 
 the earliest incursions of Arab hordes ; in his maturity he 
 imposed a degrading treaty on Rome. Khosru I. and II. 
 were equally famous in the Roman wars ; the latter cap- 
 tured Jerusalem, and his general failed to take Byzantium 
 only from the want of a fleet. In all his campaigns 
 against Rome the first Khosru was never defeated but 
 once, and his treaty with Justinian, framed upon terms 
 of equal advantage to both empires, became historic by 
 a provision which enjoined upon that persecutor of Greek 
 culture to receive again the seven great heathen teachers 
 whom he had banished, and restore their freedom of 
 speech. Yezdegerd,^ the last of the line, though not him- 
 self a soldier, but inclined to the luxurious habits of the 
 old Persian kings, vigorously resisted the Moslem invasion 
 in the seventh century for twenty years, and only yielded 
 at last to a fanaticism of conquest before which no nation 
 on the earth could stand. 
 
 And the spirit of the Sassanian kings was always 
 shared by the local chiefs, when it was itself heroic ; and 
 when it was tyrannical or weak, they recalled the old liber- 
 ties of Iran, and either dethroned the monarch or dismem- 
 bered the State.^ They set aside Kobad for his adherence 
 to the communistic schemes of Mazdak, and after his death 
 determined the succession. When Hormazd IV., after 
 
 1 Yezdegerd, called " the Wicked " by Tabari, and by the priestly traditions of Persia 
 charged with every kind of oppression and cruelty, seems to have lived in intense strife with 
 his nobles and other privileged classes, who took their revenge on him for his resistance to 
 their authority. The Christians on the contrary, who were humanely treated by him, as 
 well as the Jews, regarded his memory with affection, and called him "the Blessed." 
 (Nbldeke's note to p. 75.) 
 
 Similar differences of judgment attach to the memory of Hormazd, the son of Khosru, 
 whom Firdusi treats with great severity, while Tabari says he had strife only with the privi- 
 leged classes, and was a lover and benefactor of the poor. (Noldeke, p. 264.) 
 
 The struggle of the great Sassanians with their nobles was vain. In the later times the 
 downfall of the State was foreshadowed by the disintegration caused by this class. 
 
 Varahran V. was a brave, generous, and most popular prince, famous for dealing justly 
 with all classes of his people, and forgiving all his nobles who sought to deprive him of his 
 birthright (Malcolm, History of Persia, i. 91). His story in the epic of Firdusi is a most 
 fascinating picture of the hero, the philosopher, and the saint. 
 
 ^ These contentions, as described by Tabari and others, were incessant. 
 
41 6 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 years of beneficent government, became a despot, the tribes 
 revolted under leadership of their chiefs, who dethroned 
 him and repaid his cruelties by depriving him of sight. 
 Then they placed his general at the head of the State ; and 
 when forced to receive his son as their king they refused to 
 be placated, even though a Roman army was brought to 
 his assistance. This son Khosru II., called Parviz, a man 
 of capricious and cruel temper, but a great promoter of 
 art, order, and social prosperity, when he fled behind the 
 walls of Ctesiphon from the Roman army of Heraclius, 
 was imprisoned and put to death by his indignant nobles,^ 
 who had seen their cities burned, their sacred fires extin- 
 guished, and their people transported by thousands at a 
 time. It was Khosru II. who tore up Mahomet's letter 
 demanding submission to Islam, and flung its fragments 
 into the Kara-Su, — which, says the Mussulman chronicler, 
 shrank within its banks with horror, and refused to fertilize 
 the land of a blasphemer. He had made Persia glorious 
 abroad and prosperous at home. He had plucked out of 
 the hands of Rome the holy city of the Jews, which had 
 cost her such a terrible price, and made its hated Christians 
 with their patriarch march out into captivity behind "the 
 true cross," — the sign of the godhood of their Christ 
 changed into a trophy of Ahura. His palace was the 
 ideal of Persian pride and splendor, and his throne was 
 girded with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Yet when he 
 basely yielded to the advance of the invader, — or rather, 
 according to Tabari, when he overloaded the people with 
 exactions, maltreated the nobles, and committed cruel- 
 ties on soldiers and prisoners, — the patriotic chiefs forgot 
 everything but the personal dishonor, and, led by his own 
 son, deprived him at once of life and crown.^ 
 
 In several instances the crown was seized by idolized 
 generals, who made and unmade kings.^ It was the army 
 
 * 52S A. D. * Noldeke : Tabari, p. 356. ^ ibid., p. 396.. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 417 
 
 that raised a daughter of Khosru to the place of the first 
 female ruler of Iran since the foundation of the empire, 
 to be succeeded by her sister. The individual Will that 
 had held its own throughout Iran for all these ages, and 
 had spent its pride in upholding a throne of national 
 glory, yielded its natural result when that throne was 
 hastening to its fall. Pretenders to royalty arose every- 
 where, as in Rome in the latter days of the Caesars ; the 
 crumbling crown was seized by hand after hand, and 
 wrested from each within a few months. Province after 
 province fell apart from the rest, and the empire was the 
 prey of anarchy, simply from the absence of a personality 
 great enough to stand as the ideal of these worshippers of 
 heroic Will. It was this failure of the central ideal, not de- 
 fect of courage, patriotism, or resource, which caused this 
 great historic structure to go down before the blows of 
 Rome on the one hand, and Islam on the other. The power 
 of electing their king had come back to the nobles of Iran ; 
 but there was none to answer to the meaning of kinghood, 
 and their selection of a prince of the old Sassanian line 
 was a pathetic resort to legitimacy as their only hold upon 
 the proud traditions of the State. In truth, the wealth and 
 glory of Persia had made the imperial office a hotbed of 
 vanity and luxury; and Iranian hero-worship had become 
 dazzled by the vain show of earthly godhood with which it 
 had clothed its object. The majesty of the Sassanian 
 kings was lost, like the throne of Jemshid, before the army 
 of Heraclius had trampled on its pride. Yezdegerd had 
 worn jewelry instead of armor. Khosru had been se- 
 duced into luxurious habits by the conquest of Jerusalem. 
 Kobad II. had massacred his own family to secure the 
 crown. The spoils captured and divided by the Roman 
 chiefs in the palace of Ctesiphon, the golden horse covered 
 with precious stones, the silver camel, the heaped-up gems, 
 and the jewelled carpets of inestimable price, revealed that 
 
 27 
 
41 8 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 the souls of these later Sassanians had been buried under 
 the splendors of the mine. The old ideal of the servant 
 of Ahura could not go hand in hand with these Ahrimanic 
 seductions ; and the national spirit was already broken 
 when the united frenzy of the Arab and the Sirocco won 
 the decisive battle of Kadisiyeh, and the glorious standard 
 of Persian hero-worship, the blacksmith's apron, fell into 
 the invader's hands. Every successive battle proved more 
 clearly, that, while an ideal loyalty inspired the Mussul- 
 man, all-conquering mastership had departed from its own 
 fatherland of Iran. Her vast armies were routed and ex- 
 terminated by a handful of desert-born heroes, who had 
 been scornfully called a lizard-eating, salt-drinking horde. 
 When the elephants on which she had shifted the burden 
 of defence that belonged to men, were once despoiled of 
 their terrors by being turned upon their masters, the end 
 had come ; and the Persians saw their king, not at the 
 head of his failing hosts, but in flight on the distant bor- 
 ders. The last of the Sassanians died miserably outside of 
 his kingdom, — none knew certainly how or where. His 
 predecessors had been puppets of factions, and doomed 
 victims of the passions on whose crests they had been 
 lifted up to momentary power. Another stream of Iranian 
 fire had become extinct, having burned this time more 
 than four hundred years. 
 
 The Iranian ideal comes to its typical form for the Sas- 
 sanians, and we may perhaps say for the Persian race, in 
 Khosru I., who received the enviable title of " Soul of 
 Sweetness " (^Nicshirvdn), to which was added " The Just " 
 {Al-Adil). His reputation among his contemporaries was 
 unrivalled. Agathias speaks of Romans as well as Persians 
 who regarded him as having " reached the summit of phi- 
 losophical and literary culture," ^ being familiar through 
 translators with the highest productions of Greek genius; 
 
 * Hiitoriarum libri, ii. 28. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 419 
 
 and although he treats this tribute with evident doubt, he 
 does not hesitate to declare him the greatest of Persian 
 kings, not excepting Darius, or Cyrus himself/ Mahomet 
 is said to have held himself fortunate in being born during 
 the reign of such a prince.^ The ideal of an age must 
 have shared its spirit; and this was an age when power 
 was everywhere purchased by cruelty, from Christian bish- 
 ops who proved their piety by massacring Arians and 
 Manichaeans, to the Mazdean king opening his reign by 
 putting to death his own relatives who conspired to set 
 him aside, and exterminating the heresy of Mazdak, which 
 was perhaps necessary, by the sword. Heraclius tortured 
 Jews and heretics ; and Justinian depopulated whole 
 kingdoms, and destroyed more than ten times as many 
 Samaritan lives alone in the name of Christ as Khosru 
 destroyed Christian ones in the name of Ahura.*^ In a 
 period when law had not yet either given security or set 
 limits to personal power, the main condition of political or 
 military success was to act with resistless energy in what- 
 soever of good or evil one had to do. It is certain that 
 Khosru could show better reason for his appeals to the 
 sword than most rulers of his time could for theirs. His 
 principal wars with Rome were incited by the appeals of 
 oppressed provinces and peoples to his humanity.* The 
 heresy of Mazdak, which had already carried away the 
 court, perhaps from policy through a natural reaction 
 against despotism, against property and the family, was 
 one of those communistic storms which any civilized gov- 
 ernment must suppress, or itself perish.^ The military 
 energy of Khosru was marvellous, and had not its equal in 
 Eastern history. There was no Oriental enervation in the 
 
 1 H istoriarum libri, iv. 29. ' Gibbon, xlii. 
 
 3 See Gibbon, chaps, xliii. xlvii (Milman's edition, ii. pp. 87, 99, 183). See also Procopius: 
 De Bell. V'and. ii. And Finlay : Greece imder the Romans, pp. 284-288. 
 * Gibbon, ii. 77-S2. 
 ^ See Malcolm ; History 0/ Persia, i. 108, 109. 
 
420 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 will of this •' king of kings." His wars with the Romans 
 were a succession of rapid and overmastering blows, such 
 as the capture of Antioch and other Roman cities, with an 
 initiative which reminds us of the victories of Prussia in 
 her war with Austria. Khosru had the wealth of these 
 great cities in his treasuries before Rome knew of his 
 advance, and the foundations were laid in an hour of the 
 prodigious riches which have made Persia the synonym 
 of splendor ever since his day. He was never personally 
 defeated but once. He made treaties in a grander style 
 than other kings, — no ordinary truce between the stand- 
 ing hates of Asia and Europe, but peace which was to 
 be as endless as their wars might have been ; the eternal 
 Ahura in place of an eternal Ahriman, — the glorious 
 consummation of the universe. And when peace had to be 
 broken, he pursued war also equally in the spirit of his 
 faith, till he had secured fully equal terms with the con- 
 querors of all other nations but his own. If the Christian 
 dogma, at least as intolerant as his own, should not be 
 expelled from Persia, it should not propagate there; and 
 if Persia must give up her guardianship of the eastern 
 coast of the Euxine, Rome must pay thirty thousand 
 pieces of gold annually for an undetermined future. Only 
 Belisarius could check his path to the mastership of the 
 world ; and from Arabia to the Transoxanian tribes, his 
 armies dictated order and dynastic succession. Besides 
 inflicting on Justinian the intolerable disgrace of an an- 
 nual subsidy, he forced him to advance seven years pay- 
 ment of the same, thereby impoverishing the empire and 
 crippling its resources for supplying mercenary troops.^ 
 Rome was in no condition to bear this drain. Justin- 
 ian's administration was the most expensive and wasteful 
 that had been known for a long period. At the same time 
 the pay of the soldiers was cut down and came irregularly, 
 
 1 Finlay : Greece under ilw Ramans, p. 326. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 42 1 
 
 mercenaries were put in the place of provincial troops, and 
 foreigners placed in command ; the army was in disorder, 
 and revolts incessantly weakened its discipline. Justinian 
 failed to support his best generals, who alone, by the un- 
 aided force of military genius, sustained the fortunes of 
 his decaying empire against every discouragement from 
 within. 
 
 It was the Persia of Khosru that brought to light 
 the failing energies of Rome, and in every campaign 
 showed far more energy than her mighty rival. There 
 can be little doubt that his armies displayed more indi- 
 vidual valor than their opponents, who relied more on 
 traditional Roman discipline, which, as we have just said, 
 was already on the decline. Finlay mentions the circum- 
 stance, strongly illustrative of our view of Iranian char- 
 acter, that the Roman officers caught from the Persians 
 the passion for personal prowess; ^ and nothing could 
 have been more unfavorable to that subordination and 
 precision in which the strength of their legions consisted. 
 Khosru brought all the States into political unity and in- 
 spired them with a common loyalty, — an unprecedented 
 achievement, and of itself sufficient to prove him the 
 greatest ruler Persia had known. The old system of gov- 
 erning them by satraps, so fertile of fraud and dissension, 
 was superseded by a fourfold division of the empire, each 
 fourth being placed under a prefect, and including several 
 provinces. Central supervision was maintained not only by 
 the old expedient of official espionage, but by personal in- 
 spection. In both these ways Khosru appears to have dili- 
 gently watched over the comfort and security of the poorer 
 classes, to whose appeal special courts of inquiry were 
 always open. Poor and orphan children were the care 
 of the State, and officials were bidden to carry the poor 
 in their bosoms. P"or this kind of virtue the Mahometan 
 
 ^ Finlay : Greece under tlu Romans, p. 25S. 
 
422 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 writers give him highest credit. Mirkhond relates that he 
 executed eighty tax-gatherers at one time for extortion, 
 and rendered taxation uniform, systematic, and moderate ; 
 exempting women, together with the very old and the very 
 young. Many hundred years after his time, the people of 
 Ctesiphon showed strangers a little house hard by the ruins 
 of his palace, as a memorial of the humanity of the just 
 king. When about to build a palace, Khosru gave or- 
 ders that all the buildings on the spot should be bought, 
 and the highest price paid to their owners. But one poor 
 old woman refused to sell her little homestead, saying that 
 she would not give up the king's neighborhood for the 
 whole world ; whereat the king was so pleased, that he 
 not only allowed the house to stand, but so improved it 
 that it lasted longer than his palace itself.^ " Irregularity 
 with justice," added a courtier, " is better than symmetry 
 purchased by wrong." The legend grew, of course always 
 to the greater honor of the hero. Thus the servants of the 
 palace complained to the king that the paintings on its 
 walls were suffering from the smoke that came from the 
 old woman's fire ; but Khosru commanded that the pic- 
 tures should be renewed as often as they needed it, and 
 that no one should molest the hearth of the poor.^ It is 
 related that being sick, the king was advised by his phy- 
 sicians to take as a remedy pounded brick from a ruined 
 Persian town ; but when the messengers returned from 
 searching after it, they reported that not a ruined town 
 was to be found in his dominions. When warned against 
 going abroad without protection, he wrote : " Justice is the 
 protection of kings." " All I give to worthy people is 
 saved, not lost." " The happiness of his people is a 
 better defence for a king than armies, and justice a bet- 
 ter fertilizer of his lands than the happiest climate." To 
 
 • Travels of Yai;ut-el-Rumi (twelfth century), Zeitschr. d. Deuisch. Morgenl- Geselhck. 
 xviii. 406. - Caswine, ibid. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 423 
 
 his son Hormazd he left this last injunction : " Remem- 
 ber the poor; and be not seduced by indolence and self- 
 indulgence." And the pious son of Islam, catching this 
 broad humanity of an unbeliever, concludes, — " Since 
 death has not spared this great prince, the wise man 
 should- not attach himself to the goods of this world." ^ 
 A true Zoroastrian, Khosru reorganized industry, and 
 encouraged agriculture. After the fashion of model Ori- 
 ental kings, he established a fixed land-tax, and advanced 
 seed and implements to the husbandmen.^ His laws pro- 
 vided for reclaiming waste lands ; he enforced irrigation, 
 punished idleness, and opened good roads through the 
 empire. The great dike of Shuster, built of immense 
 stones clamped together, is claimed as his work. To 
 purify administration, the official "jackals" throughout the 
 country were put to death. ^ To increase population, mar- 
 riage was made compulsory, immigration encouraged, and 
 colonists from conquered countries were settled on the 
 land.* To protect his empire from the northern hordes, 
 he completed the long wall commenced by Kobad, famous 
 as the barrier of Gog and Magog, of stones seven feet thick 
 and twenty feet long, without cement, and which still 
 stands stretching three hundred miles along the Georgian 
 mountains ; and in every treaty with Rome he jealously 
 stipulated that both empires should unite in guarding these 
 borders from the common foe. It was a curious instance 
 of the intermingling of barbarous with humane impulses 
 which characterized this great type of Iranian Will, that he 
 built a new city out of the spoils of his terrible Syrian cam- 
 paign, — a march as merciless to life as it was rapacious 
 of booty, — put his Syrian captives into this new home as 
 like as possible to that from which they were exiled, and 
 
 ' Mirkliond : Hisioire des Sassanides, translated by De Sacy. 
 
 - Malcolm: History of Persia, i. 115. s Ibid., 1. 117. 
 
 * Rawliiison : Persia. 
 
424 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 made it an asylum for Greek slaves. As he forsook the 
 use of wood for that of stone in his public buildings, so he 
 seemed to possess the gift in administration of putting 
 everything to new and permanent uses. Thus the past and 
 future of Persia centred in him. He revived the old code 
 (or rather moral and political maxims) of Ardeshir, and 
 so ennobled it that its important features passed over into 
 the golden age of the Mussulman caliphs. He made the 
 priesthood watchers over the interests of the people by 
 inspection of the conduct of officials. Above all, his 
 services to literature and philosophy conferred immortal 
 renown on his country and his race. Even on the Mus- 
 sulman conquerors his intellectual reputation produced a 
 kind of messianic awe, and took the usual mythical form 
 of a childhood, before which the aged counsellors of the 
 kingdom bent to hear a wisdom higher than their own.^ 
 
 The testimony of Agathias to his encouragement of free 
 discussion on theological and cosmical questions is qualified 
 by the Byzantine's studied contempt for the sophist Uranius, 
 with whom he declares the king to have been infatuated, and 
 by his vivid description of the disappointment of the seven 
 Greek scholars at the whole character of Persian civiliza- 
 tion, which they had painted in ideal colors before their 
 arrival at the court. According to Agathias, these cul- 
 tivated men hurried away, persuaded that it would be 
 better to suffer immediate martyrdom on reaching their 
 native country than to endure the spectacle of such bar- 
 barous customs and corrupt administration. But the 
 Greek historian evidently writes under a strong bias 
 against " the barbarian," and contradicts that high repute 
 of Persia in enlightened Athens on which the sages had 
 based their glowing expectations, and in regard to which 
 the Athenians could not have been mistaken. The trans- 
 
 ' Mirkhond. Be Sicy's translation ol Hzsiotre des Sassamdes, p. ssg. T^'dldeke's Taiart, 
 p 162. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 425 
 
 cendental nature of the questions discussed at the court 
 of Khosrii, although put in a ridiculous Ught by the shal- 
 low chronicler, prove intellectual tastes and sympathies 
 of a high order. Here was a king of Asia who made 
 actual what Alexander had dreamed ; who had set trans- 
 lators at work upon all the great philosophies and poems 
 of Greece ; who could read and discuss them ; who took 
 pride in furnishing every aid to the Greek-speaking world 
 for acquiring a knowledge of his country and its institu- 
 tions;^ who founded colleges and schools;^ who stands out 
 as a calm rationalist in relief against the fanaticism of his 
 day; who compelled the priesthood of Ahura to meet and 
 tolerate the speculative and religious thought of the world ; 
 who opened his arms to the representatives of Greek cul- 
 ture when their schools had been closed and their voices 
 silenced by the Christian Church and State; and who made 
 special provision for their liberty of teaching in his treaty 
 with Rome.'^ " He began his reign," says Mirkhond, " by 
 proclaiming that his power did not extend over the con- 
 sciences of his subjects, since only the All-seeing could 
 judge the heart; that justice, not caprice, should govern 
 his judgments, and that administrative reform was his 
 first duty. Behold the reward of righteousness ; time has 
 not been able to destroy the palace of Khosru."* His 
 interest in physical studies was a rare thing in that age, 
 and could least be expected in an Asiatic monarch ; and 
 his medical school at Susa embraced the study of phi- 
 losophy and poetry. His vizier, Abu-zurd-Mihir, raised 
 from the lowest ranks through the penetration of the king, 
 is scarcely less famous for wisdom and humanity than 
 
 1 Through his favorite interpreter, Sergius, to whom Agathias was indebted for what he 
 has recorded (History, iv. 30, Latin). 
 
 ^ So says Malcolm, i. iro. 
 
 3 Noldeke ; Tabari, p. 162. 
 
 * Mirkhond: Sassanian Kings, translated by De Sacy. See also Zeenui-icl-Tuarikh. 
 (Malcolm, i. 108), and Firdiisi's account ol hts talks with the Mobads- 
 
426 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Khosru himself.^ Firdusi records his magnificent declar- 
 ation of the rights of conscience. 
 
 But Khosru's greatest services to future ages were per- 
 formed in collecting and preserving the heroic legends of 
 Iran, which were destined to become immortal as the Shah- 
 Nameh, or Book of Kings; and in bringing out of India, 
 and transmitting through a Pehlevi version to all languages 
 of the civilized world the oldest Bible for Rulers, — the 
 marvellous Sanskrit Apologues, which are known to us, in 
 substance, through two variations, the " Hitopade^a " and 
 the " Pancha-tantra," — as the noblest treasury of practical 
 wisdom and humane culture in the Oriental world. In 
 what form this old Book of Wisdom was brought into 
 Persia we cannot now tell ; for, like the rest of the native 
 Persian literature of the Sassanian period, the translation 
 made by order of Khosril perished at the Moslem con- 
 quest. We know it only through an expanded Mahome- 
 tan-Persian version of the fifteenth century, — the "Anvar-i 
 Suhaili," or " Lights of Canopus," — and from the Arabic 
 version of the eighth century of the " Book of 'Kalilah and 
 Damnah,' " of which the other was a secondary revision.^ It 
 is reasonable to suppose that the king's Pehlevi translation 
 much more closely resembled the Hindu originals we have 
 named, than do these later Mahometan ones. While the 
 " Pancha-tantra " and the " Hitopadega " themselves ma- 
 terially differ from each other in their list of fables, and still 
 more in the maxims which are thickly strown among them, 
 they are alike in their extreme directness and simplicity of 
 form, which is in absolute contrast with the verbose and 
 hyperbolic language of the later Persian "Anvar-i Suhaili." 
 Besides this difference of style, the Persian work contains a 
 very large amount of material not to be found in either of 
 
 1 See chap, on Shah-Nameh. 
 
 - Both have been translated into English, — Kalilah and Damfuth, by Knatchbull, 1819; 
 and the Anvar-i Suliaill, by Eastwick, 1S54. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 427 
 
 the Others, and is thoroughly Persian in its character. But 
 the spirit of all three is one and the same; and throughout 
 all the changes undergone by this venerable Gospel of the 
 Duties of Kings, there is no marring of the soul of justice, 
 tenderness, nobility, and reverence for humanity which 
 pervades these genial tales and aphorisms; no lowering of 
 the tone of serious remonstrance and rebuke, of high ex- 
 hortation couched in parable and hint and maxim ; no wav- 
 ering from the standard set before the sovereign, at the 
 beginning of the " Anvar-i Suhaili," when he accepts labor 
 and trial for " the repose of his oppressed subjects and 
 the peace of the poor among his people,"^' and at the end 
 when his epitaph reads, — 
 
 '* Two things life offers, — fame, the virtuous deed. 
 Save these, ' All tilings ai'e sjibject to decay^ 
 Injure not others, help men to succeed ; 
 Thus shalt thou reap a blessing for to-day — 
 And the next world, when this hath passed away."^ 
 
 Firdusi tells us the legend, that Barsuyah the physician 
 brought word to Khosru of a Hindu book which taught 
 how to bring the dead to life, where the wise interpreted 
 the teaching to mean resurrection from the death of ignor- 
 ance ; and being successful in committing it piecemeal to 
 memory, he brought it to Persia in great joy, saying, " The 
 ocean of wisdom has indeed come to us," and begged of 
 the king that the vizier in re-editing it might make the 
 opening a memorial of himself. 
 
 This dumb morality, and the reverence for a Providen- 
 tial destiny, which is equally prominent in the IMahom- 
 etan version, is in substance identical with the homely, 
 practical, uninspired tone of the Hindu books, through 
 all the difference of form. We may be sure that Khosru's 
 information of the world-famed book, " whose wisdom in 
 all that befits a king had been compiled from the speech 
 
 1 Anvar-i Suhaili^ p. 70- ^ Ibid., p. 649. 
 
428 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 of animals," and his unspeakable desire to obtain it, were 
 associated with these all-pervading qualities that make it 
 so impressive to us ; and if, as the Mahometan writer as- 
 sures us, " his actions, as they may be traced in his justice 
 and beneficence, his conquests of countries and his ways 
 of soothing the hearts of his subjects, were based on the 
 perusal of this book," we can understand why it is that he 
 stands at the zenith of royalty for all Persian and even 
 Mahometan faith. 
 
 The age of Khosru brings him into direct contrast and 
 comparison with another great monarch of equal fame, but 
 of far inferior qualities, the head of Christendom as he was 
 of Heathendom, — the Roman emperor, Justinian, with 
 whose name are associated the compilation of Roman 
 law and the general, though by no means final, suppression 
 of Paganism in the Christian world. The most striking 
 difference is that the glory of Khosru is thoroughly per- 
 sonal, that of Justinian external and incidental. Justinian 
 was a bad administrator of the empire, financial, political, 
 civil, religious ; he was a bigot, and an extortioner from the 
 poor. " His victories and his losses," says Gibbon, " w^ere 
 alike pernicious to mankind." Italy and Africa were 
 desolated ; Vandals and Moors were slain by millions ; and 
 fifty thousand laborers were starved in a single district of 
 Italy alone. " Khosru," says Procopius,^ " was a bad man, 
 but it was Justinian who incessantly stirred up the Persian 
 wars." Under his system of taxation, landed proprietors 
 were impoverished and reduced to the level of slaves ; his 
 civil-service system was far more corrupt than the Persian, 
 his treasury filled with the open sale of offices. He cheated 
 his troops of their pay, heaped abuse upon his best gen- 
 erals, and left them unaided in face of overpowering foes. 
 The whole empire was discouraged and demoralized at the 
 moment when hordes of barbarians threatened its very 
 
 1 Historia Arcana, p. iS. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 429 
 
 existence with incessant raids and terrible devastations. 
 He even cut down the army to save expense, while he lav- 
 ished immense sums on public buildings and churches and 
 monasteries. He closed the schools of philosophy, and 
 destroyed the municipal institutions of Greece. He abol- 
 ished the Olympic games, but encouraged the frightfully 
 riotous and internecine factions of the circus. He emptied 
 the local treasuries of Greece, and gave over her cities to 
 ruin. The central authority was broken down for all pur- 
 poses but that of persecution, and its place filled with the 
 anarchical wilfulness of soldiers, monks, usurers, sects, and 
 officials. 
 
 And perhaps one main reason, that with all the military 
 prestige of the Roman empire it found itself again and 
 again beaten back by Persia, lay in this premature dis- 
 integration by the extortionate, selfish, and intolerant 
 policy of Justinian and his successors. Nothing in his 
 private character could justify confidence or quicken the 
 failing patriotism of the empire. John of Cappadocia, 
 notoriously the most villanous ecclesiastic of his day, was 
 his special favorite. His early intrigues and crimes, and 
 his uxorious submission throughout his long reign to the 
 unscrupulous Theodora, whose vices filled all the best his- 
 torical writers of the age with indignation and contempt, 
 gave added impulse to the downward tendencies of the 
 State. ^ That dissolution of nationality into multitudes of 
 discordant, rebellious wills, which befell the last days of 
 Sassanian Persia, began at a much earlier moment in the 
 Graeco-Roman empire ; and in both, the compensation was 
 a return in some measure to that force of personality 
 which always conditions the passing away of old systems, 
 and the entrance of new social or religious forces. 
 
 It might be supposed that the new life thus introduced 
 into the decaying frame of Justinian's empire was Chris- 
 
 1 Gibbon, xlvii. 
 
430 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 tianity ; but Christianity was itself the reHgion of the State, 
 the narrowing creed, the rule of ecclesiastical councils and 
 military edicts, tending to the utter annihilation of per- 
 sonal freedom and rational inquiry. The new life which 
 national disintegration indicated was the birth of heresy 
 everywhere, the heroism of martyrs, the building up of a 
 rival religion, which absorbed great sections of the Roman 
 world. 
 
 It is stated by Procopius, that the persecutions by Jus- 
 tinian of Christians and Pagans alike not only caused great 
 religious revolts in various parts of the empire, which re- 
 sulted in multitudes of deaths by suicide and war, and 
 great accessions to Paganism and Manichseism, but that 
 by reason of them great numbers fled for shelter to nations 
 outside of Roman or Christian sway.^ His superstition 
 made him a willing tool of an intolerant priesthood, so that, 
 as Gibbon says, "his whole reign was a uniform yet various 
 scene of persecution." He gave bishops the right to use 
 the military arm to compel conversions. He was so fool- 
 ish as to believe that all the heresy in his empire could be 
 abolished by a three months' warning to be converted or 
 banished, and Paganism be destroyed by inquisitors ; also 
 for the crime of a creed, he stamped out almost the 
 whole nation of the Samaritans, from which his Master had 
 brought a type of humanity to rebuke the priests and Le- 
 vites of his own race. He refused unbelievers in Christian- 
 ity the right to testify, to teach, or to bequeath, and imposed 
 death as a penalty for refusing baptism. But by the irony 
 of events, this arch-persecutor of heretics died not without 
 the taint of heresy upon his name. 
 
 Every portion of the empire was devastated by these 
 systematic attempts to eradicate both Pagan and hereti- 
 cal belief,^ and the Byzantine historians even talk of a 
 
 1 Procopius : Hisioria A rcaiut, xi. 
 
 2 Gibljon, chap, xlvii. pp 182-83. Finlay : History 0/ Greece, p. 324. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 43 I 
 
 depopulation of the world by his religious wars.^ The 
 ecclesiastical writers themselves denounce the imperial 
 couple of "Christian" propagandists, whose very differ- 
 ences and discords added to the general miseries.'^ "They 
 seemed not human, but some malignant form of demonic 
 existence sent to plague mankind." ^ Yet all their bar- 
 barity failed to eradicate Paganism, which was destined 
 to reappear in a more powerful form than ever, when the 
 gigantic empire of Islam arose among the outposts of the 
 empire, and drove back the advancing tide of Christianity 
 from some of its fairest portions. Nor must we forget that 
 this new form of Paganism not only drew under the shelter 
 of its wings some of the best elements of Christianity,'* as 
 well as of Mazdeism, but also contained within itself prin- 
 ciples, spiritual and ethical, at least as elevated as the 
 degenerate church of the later Roman empire. 
 
 In truth, the fall of the Byzantine as well as that of the 
 Persian State illustrates the destiny of politico-religious 
 systems based on the authority of Will.^ Justinian and his 
 successors absorbed all those duties which truly educate 
 the citizen, into absolute personal government, directed by 
 the absolutism of a monarchical Church, whose sovereign 
 will they claimed to represent. Justin, Maurice, Phocas, 
 Heraclius, some of them really good and able men, all 
 pursued the same policy of unifying the religious beliefs of 
 the empire by the often barbarous exercise of despotic 
 will ; and so the destruction of all those broad national 
 sympathies and institutions by which a people are trained 
 to obey good laws and confide in those who administer 
 t them, went on in spite of every virtuous effort by the ruler 
 to reconcile his system with the public good.^ When the 
 
 1 Procopius : Historia Arcana, xviii. ^ Jbid., iii. ' Ibid., xii. 
 
 * For example, Nestorian schools of Syria, after their expulsion by Justinian, and then by 
 Leo the Isaiirian. 
 
 5 Procopius : Historia Arcana, xxx. 
 
 " See the striking picture of tliese tendencies in Finlay's Greece ttnder the Romans. 
 Zeller : Entretiens sur I 'histoire, x. 
 
432 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 Persian empire neared its fall, it had gone through similar 
 disintegrating phases, not so much from the absolutism of 
 orthodoxy as from the weakness of monarchs who failed 
 to justify the popular demand for heroic personal ideals. 
 The logic of human nature brought a common result to 
 both. But a new and stronger will than royal vicegerent 
 of Ormuzd or of Christ appeared in the Allah of Islam, 
 whose decrees wrought in his servant's will with the re- 
 sistless power of Fate. 
 
 There is indeed another side to this picture of Justinian, 
 which has doubtless been colored by partisan feeling. His 
 priv^ate habits seem to have been pure,^ and his passions 
 under control. There are evidences of real humanity in 
 his re-enactment of Constantine's law against gladiatorial 
 shows ; and his literary and artistic tastes were proved by 
 a multitude of public works, as well as by his constant 
 intercourse, within the limits of his creed, with men of 
 high culture in every department of thought and action. 
 In all these respects he is not discredited by comparison 
 with his great contemporary. He was a centre of illustrious 
 men ; his great architect Anthemius, his great jurist Tri- 
 bonian, his great generals Belisarius and Narses, his great 
 historian Procopius, were a glory of which any emperor 
 might be proud. Above all, the devotion of the great 
 legal talent of the age to the codification of Roman law 
 out of the confused heap of traditions, decisions, and special 
 codes gathered from the writings of forty civilians, and the 
 concentration of two thousand treatises into fifty books ; the 
 separation of all these data into their historical elements 
 and order of growth, and the stamping of the whole with 
 the fruits of Roman civilization in the jurisprudence of his 
 own time, — this marvellous substructure of the legislation 
 of the modern civilized world is an achievement which 
 
 1 It will not do to attach too much confidence to the strange revelations of Procopius, in 
 his Sc-crei Memoirs, which differ so utterly from his Public History of the Emperor. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 433 
 
 may well immortalize the names of all who had share in 
 its accomplishment. For the public spirit, the persevering 
 energy, the legal acumen and research required for this 
 vast undertaking, the praise belongs to Justinian and the 
 great lawyers whom he selected for it, — especially to Tri- 
 bonian, the master-spirit of the whole. But that which 
 constitutes the immortal value of the Pandects and the 
 Code does not belong to that age, or to its ruling spirits 
 in government or law. Their best was not the work of 
 Christian emperors. Their limitations to the " patria po- 
 testas; " their steps towards testamentary justice, towards 
 the emancipation of women and of slaves ; their broad 
 recognition of the jiis gejitiiun or laws of universal appli- 
 cation as distinguished from the privileges of Roman de- 
 scent or rights of conquest, — whatever gives breadth and 
 permanent value to this monument of jurisprudence was 
 mainly the work of a nobler and freer age, the product of 
 the spirit infused into Roman law by the great Stoic school, 
 centuries previous, when they brought the equity of their 
 philosophical " Law of Nature" to bear upon the accumu- 
 lating laws of nations and the praetorian edicts by which 
 these were administered as nearly as possible upon a com- 
 mon basis ; and not only upon these, but upon the civil 
 law of the Roman State, as developed through successive 
 ages and codes. ^ The effect of this grand ethical con- 
 ception of Stoicism was the rapid adjustment of laws to 
 universal principles of justice and the rights and duties 
 of humanity. The great age of Roman jurisprudence 
 covers the reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines.^ The 
 imperial constitutions which succeeded that period are 
 marked by reaction to despotic sway, and by increasing 
 servility in the construction and interpretation of laws. 
 And the treatment of this nobler legislation by Justinian 
 
 * See Maine's Ancient Law, p. 65. 
 2 Compare Woolsey's Introduction to Roman Law. 
 28 
 
434 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 and his supple parliament of jurists was in full keeping with 
 these accepted requirements of the interests of the State. 
 Besides av^oiding the freer and purer spirits of the old re- 
 public, they corrupted the records of these best days of 
 the empire, and blotted out the noblest statutes, which 
 they dared not indorse. And so unscrupulously was this 
 done, that " the contradictions of the Code and Pandects 
 still exercise the patience and subtilty of modern civil- 
 ians." ^ How far the same hands are responsible for the 
 disappearance of the greater portion of the literature and 
 data of Roman jurisprudence is uncertain ; the charge of a 
 deliberate purpose to destroy what did not suit the des- 
 potic aims of Justinian has no other ground than the sup- 
 pression and corruption already mentioned. But the work 
 which was to supersede them came very near to sharing 
 their fate; and it is said that all the manuscripts of the 
 Pandects are derived from one original, preserved with 
 devout care in the palace of the Florentine republic.^ 
 
 The jurisprudence of Justinian was in fact no exception 
 to the general spirit of his reign. Whatever the oppor- 
 tunities, afforded by his grand survey of national experi- 
 ence, he discovered no means of staying the degeneracy 
 of Roman civilization. As compared with Constantinople 
 at this period, Persia was a country of order and law. The 
 horrible anarchy of the circus, with its incessant blood- 
 shed and sensuality (so vividly described by Gibbon),^ 
 stimulated to its worst excesses by the emperor's own 
 eager support and encouragement of the most barbarous 
 of the factions,* was unparalleled in any heathen land. 
 In the ferocious brawl of the Nika sedition, the best part 
 of the city was ravaged and burned by the savage factions 
 of the Blues and Greens, and thirty thousand persons 
 slaughtered, — a carnage suppressed only by the vigor 
 
 1 Gibbon, chap. xliv. = Ibid. ^ Ibid., chap. xl. 
 
 * See Zeller's account of the massacre nf the Nika {Eniretiens sur V hisioire), chap. x. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 435 
 
 of Belisarius. Yet these factions were deliberately en- 
 couraged by the imperial champions of Christianity and 
 law. The long, lingering decay of the Byzantine empire, 
 — plucked by barbarians and assailed by Turks, torn by 
 political and religious factions, by strife with Rome and 
 Alexandria, crazed with theological disputes, — was one 
 wretched commingling of rebellion, assassination, and dis- 
 traction, dominated only by the insane endeavor to enforce 
 uniformity of religious belief. The military and adminis- 
 trative genius of Heraclius furnished the only check upon 
 this headlong descent. And when Persia fell under the 
 sway of Islam, a future of intellectual and political great- 
 ness opened upon her, in striking contrast with the mel- 
 ancholy spectacle of this servile empire, the bequest of 
 Justinian to his Church and his laws. 
 
 The fierce intolerance of Justinian, though in extreme 
 contrast with the spirit of his Persian rival, was entirely in 
 accordance with that of most Sassanian kings. Mazdeism, 
 like Judaism and Christianity, could not tolerate a different 
 object of worship from its own, because this object of its 
 worship was a single personal Will, ruling its worshippers 
 by direct command. The bitter exclusiveness of the Per- 
 sian Mobads betrayed itself whenever they were intrusted 
 by their kings with power, as invariably as did that of the 
 Christian priesthood and Moslem orthodox upon a like 
 opportunity. The Sassanian line began with an exter- 
 minating warfare upon all unbelievers in Ahura, whose 
 holiness could not endure the presence of these servants 
 of Ahriman ; and their successors, for the most part, fol- 
 lowed in the same track. From this intolerance the Jews 
 were excepted, almost always continuing on good terms 
 with the Persians, partly from a common veneration for 
 the name of Cyrus, and partly from the very intensity of 
 exclusiveness common to Ahura and Jahveh, which, com- 
 bined with great ethical resemblance, strongly suggested 
 
436 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 that they were one and the same God. The comparative 
 weakness of the Jews and their hatred of Rome were also 
 points of attraction for the Sassanian monarchs, who found 
 Christianity far more dangerous than Judaism, and especi- 
 ally after its ascension to the throne of the Caesars. Shapur 
 I., the great conqueror, was believed, from the inscription 
 at Haji-Abad, to have embraced Christianity; but the 
 reading has been shown by liaug to be erroneous. That 
 he first encouraged Mani and then banished him, is uncer- 
 tain tradition; that the great heretic returned, to be put to 
 death by Varahran II., is not improbable.^ Shapur II. was 
 persecuting the Christians when Constantine came to the 
 throne. Yezdegerd I., converted to Christianity, falls into 
 deadly strife with the Magi, and is called " the Wicked ; " 
 then recurring to Mazdeism, he inflicts barbarous penalty 
 on the Christians for five years. Varahran I. puts them 
 to torture. Yezdegerd II. imposes Mazdeism by force on 
 the Armenian church (450 A. I).), and having quelled the 
 revolt of Vartan, makes martyrs of all who would not 
 recant. Khosru II., professing Christianity, devout slave 
 of the Virgin and of St. Michael, and husband of a Chris- 
 tian woman, surrendered Jerusalem to the ferocity of Jew- 
 ish and Persian priests, who massacred or banished the 
 whole Christian population, on pretence of punishing them 
 for hiding " the true cross." 
 
 That this chronic intolerance proceeded from the nature 
 of personal Will as the ideal of worship, is evident from the 
 fact that these Sassanian kings, so far from being men of 
 cruel disposition were generally, in civil affairs, benevolent 
 and just. To Hormazd I, is ascribed the institution of a 
 court for trying complaints of the poor against the rich, over 
 which he often presided. The chief persecutor of Christian- 
 
 ' Although the savage cruelty of his execution, as described by Tabari (Niildeke, p. 47), 
 is probably a fiction, at any rate Manichasisra was fiercely persecuted, though in no wise put 
 down. 
 
THE SASSANIAN EMPIRE. 437 
 
 ity, Varahran V., was held a model king in his treatment 
 of his people, and in his regard for arts, sciences, and all the 
 functions of the State. ^ Peroz, also intolerant, remitted all 
 taxes during a seven years' drought, distributed corn and 
 money, and used every expedient for the preservation of 
 his people. Shapur II., as bitter in his treatment of Chris- 
 tianity as he was heroic in his wars against Arabia and 
 Rome, is credited with such maxims as these: "Words 
 may be refreshing as the rain or sharp as a sword." " A 
 spear may be drawn out of a wound, but a harsh word 
 cannot be plucked out of a wounded heart." Yezdegerd I. 
 said that the wisest king is he who never punishes in anger, 
 and follows his first impulse to reward the good. 
 
 The obscure history of Mazdak and his school of com- 
 munists is a striking illustration of our position, that Sassa- 
 nian severities in religion were consistent with a consider- 
 able degree of social and political freedom. This Mazdak 
 admitted the national faith, but added a system of com- 
 munism, abolishing marriage and property, and otherwise 
 threatening the destruction of the whole social order. His 
 following increased, till it became necessary to suppress 
 the whole movement by the uprising of the better classes 
 of the community. The king himself, Kobad I., was infatu- 
 ated with doctrines which would have swept away all royal 
 government in an hour, and had to be dethroned. Restored 
 by a Tartar army, he resumed his crown, forgiving his 
 opponents, and discouraging the subversive school of 
 Mazdak. Yet so deep-rooted was the evil, that Khosru 
 on his accession is said to have been obliged to suppress 
 it by putting to death a hundred thousand persons. How 
 much of historical truth is contained in these traditions 
 is uncertain. But the fact is unquestionable, that this 
 revolutionary system had been suffered to reach wide 
 diffusion before it was put down by force ; and such dif- 
 
 ' See especially Firdusi's Bahratn-gour. 
 
438 POLITICAL FORCES. 
 
 fusion implies a free circulation and discussion of social 
 theories, and a power of association among the working 
 classes, which we should hardly expect to find in that 
 period or in an Oriental State. The protests against 
 luxury and monopoly ascribed to Mazdak, his puritanism 
 in diet and dress, and general preaching of self-restraint, 
 hardly comport with the excesses which his followers are 
 said to have committed against decency, property, and 
 peace. 
 
 On the other hand, the persecution of the Manichaean 
 heresy, both in the East and the West, grew directly out 
 of the religious motive we have already described. 
 
PHILOSOPHIES. 
 I. 
 
 MANICHiEISM. 
 
MANICH^ISM. 
 
 THE invincible exclusiveness of Mazdean will-worship 
 was conspicuous in its treatment of Mani, who repre- 
 sented a natural growth of its own dualistic ideas, but 
 combined these with a wide eclecticism, the equally natural 
 result of the intrusion of numerous races and religions 
 upon the soil of Iran. All tradition is agreed that Mani 
 had attained the largest culture possible in his day. He 
 was an astronomer, a physicist, a musician, and an artist of 
 eminence, who could use his gifts with great effect, not 
 only to charm the public taste, but to illustrate his own 
 written thought. He had mastered the faith, first of the 
 Magi, then of the Christians, and had travelled far and 
 wide to the cradle-lands of other and older religions. It 
 is not improbable that the eastern legend of his having 
 sent out three apostles — Addas, Thomas, and Hermas 
 — towards different quarters of the world, and of his per- 
 sonal relations with Scythianus and Terebinthus or Buddas 
 (names that have no historic meaning, except as types of 
 the Egyptian and Indian religions),^ is simply the mythical 
 expression of his eclectic method and wide religious sym- 
 pathies.2 Some of the early Fathers connect him with 
 Brahmanism.3 His followers identified him with Christ, 
 Buddha, Zoroaster, and Mithra, and believed that all these 
 religious names meant the one solar Deity .^ His acquain- 
 tance with the Jewish Cabala and the Gnostic masters, 
 who for a century had been constructing heretical systems 
 
 * Archelaus : Dispiitatio cum Mamie, c. 51, 52. 
 
 * Lassen : Ind. Alterth., iii. 403. Colditz : Die Entstehung d. Munich. (1837). 
 ^ Ephrem Syrus, and Epiphanius. 
 
 * Herbelot: Biblioih^qtie Orientale — Mani. 
 
442 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 out of the combination of Syrian and Greek ideas with 
 Christian faith, was complete. In his large survey, he re- 
 jected no belief by reason of prejudice against the system 
 of which it formed a part. The asceticism and metem- 
 psychosis of the Brahman ; the emanation and emancipa- 
 tion of the Buddhist; the mystical and prophetic element 
 even in that Judaism whose Jahveh was in his belief a 
 delusion and snare to man ; the Dualism of the Persians, 
 and the Saviour of the Christians, though under forms 
 which materially differed from those of their respective 
 orthodox creeds, — all entered into an elaborate system 
 which seemed to be devised for meeting the largest number 
 of special wants in an age of many conflicting religions 
 and philosophical schools. When we add that he ap- 
 peared in Persia at a time when two parties had arisen in 
 the Mazdean church, — the one strongly dualistic, the other 
 seeking to place a distinctly supreme unity beyond the 
 two ethical contraries, — and that his own system took an 
 intermediate ground, in some respects differing from both, 
 in some agreeing with one or the other, — there seems to 
 be no sufficient reason for doubting, as the historian of 
 Gnosticism has done,^ that Mani really purposed to con- 
 struct a universal system out of the ferment of beliefs 
 in his time. I cannot agree with Matter that this was 
 unnatural in a philosopher of that age and country. On 
 the contrary, circumstances seemed to make it the most 
 natural thing in the world ; and the probability is height- 
 ened by the remarkable union of imaginative and rational- 
 istic elements in the system itself 
 
 This is the higher significance of Manichaeism, and 
 affords the true point of view for explaining the extreme 
 intolerance with which it was pursued by the three great 
 religions, — IMazdeism, Judaism, and Christianity. The war 
 waged against it was a war of narrow dogmatism against 
 
 ^ Matter • Histoire Critiqjie du Gnosiicisme, iii- 73 
 
MANICH/EISM. 443 
 
 universal tendencies, however imperfect their expression, 
 however distorted by the false lights of the day. Through 
 all historical doubts and conflicting details the one fact 
 stands fast, — that wherever Mani appeared, or his system 
 found foothold, they were persecuted with a ferocity unex- 
 ampled even in the ancient world.^ We must ascribe this 
 fact to the boldness and breadth of his eclecticism ; to the 
 promise of his method to solve all religious problems by a 
 Gnostic insight beyond and above all outward revelation 
 by church or book; to its rationalistic criticism of the cur- 
 rent grounds of belief; and to the seeming claims of the 
 new apostle or paraclete to rival the head of the Christian 
 Church, and to supersede Zoroaster and Moses, — to all 
 of whom he seemed to give a recognition by accepting 
 just so much of every system as would give him a hear- 
 ing with its disciples, while subtly undermining it by a 
 more stringent logic and a refusal of implicit faith. Fir- 
 dusi reports Mani as saying that his painting proved him 
 a prophet, and asserts that he was put to death for his 
 image-worship. Only these signs of a larger mental scope 
 and freedom can account for the peculiar violence which 
 marked the Manichaean persecutions down to the Middle 
 Ages, when the name was applied to numerous heresies 
 as the very strongest term of hatred and reproach. By the 
 necessity of their belief, and by the confession of the best 
 of their opponents, the Manichaeans were pure in their 
 morals ; and the charges brought against them were pre- 
 cisely those of which the Christians had reason to know 
 the worthlessness from their own experience of the same. 
 Libanius the rhetorician, in his appeal to Constantine on 
 their behalf, describes them as scattered over many coun- 
 tries of the earth, injuring none, but suffering injuries from 
 many ; abstemious, and counting death a gain.^ Yet not 
 
 1 Spiegel : Erdtt. Altertk., ii. Neander : Church History, ii. 770. 
 * Neander : Church History, ii 768. 
 
444 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 only was Man! cruelly put to death by Varahran the Sas- 
 sanian king, but the Christian emperors from Constantine 
 to Justinian, with but one or two exceptions, tried per- 
 petually to exterminate the sect. They were burned at 
 the stake by Vandals in Africa, and by Catholic Christians 
 in Europe for six centuries.^ Augustine, converted from 
 their communion to Christianity, turned upon them with 
 all the bitter and arbitrary injustice of which his passion- 
 ate nature was capable. And later Christian apologists 
 have argued a priori the necessity of immorality, as a 
 result of the Manichaean belief in the physical unreality 
 of the Christ and in the impurity of the senses and sexual 
 relations ; unable to see that the very same tendencies were 
 important factors in Christian faith, and led not only to the 
 exaltation of Jesus above all laws and conditions of matter, 
 but to the meritoriousness of celibacy and the monastic 
 life. In the same way the division of Manichaean believers 
 into the two classes of "hearers" and "elect" has been 
 supposed to justify the same charges, in face of precisely 
 similar distinctions in the Christian Church from the be- 
 ginning to the present day ! The Sassanians persecuted a 
 Dualism which was the logical issue of their own creed, 
 and the Jews a Cabalism which in substance they could 
 find in their Talmud. 
 
 Such evil treatment of a system which sought to find 
 points of sympathy with every one of the great religions 
 of the world, becomes the more remarkable the more fully 
 these points are appreciated. It must be remembered that 
 Mani claimed to be a Christian, and that he was thoroughly 
 a Gnostic, and in some points even a Judaistic, Christian. 
 In his depreciation of the senses, though Mani forsook the 
 first principle of Mazdeism, yet he was very far from anti- 
 Christian. Even his Dualism, Mazdean in substance, was 
 almost equally in accordance with Christianity, in which 
 
 1 Trace this in Jortin's Ecclesiastical History. 
 
MANICH.'EISM. 445 
 
 Satan corresponded to his Evil Principle, dominating man 
 till deliverance should come in the Christ. The light 
 shining in the darkness, which comprehended it not, was 
 the substance of both Alexandrian and Catholic theology, 
 the soul of the Gospel of John as well as of the Avesta; 
 and the emancipation of the Good Principle was as posi- 
 tively predicted by Mani as the triumph of Christ in the 
 Gospels, or of Ahura in the Avesta. Nor is it easy to see 
 how the developed creed of Christianity could have ob- 
 jected to Manichoean Dualism as a religious dogma, since 
 the Christian God was admitted to be unable to eradicate 
 evil from the universe, and his unity had slipped into 
 trinity, and this had so verged upon tritheism as to fill the 
 Church with irreconcilable contradiction and contention. 
 
 But these very points of resemblance did but aggravate 
 the intense and peculiar hatred of the three great religions 
 to Manichaeism as the most intolerable of heresies. And 
 for this there was a reason common to all three. They 
 were all religions of personal Will. Jahveh, Ahura, 
 Christ, were absolute sovereigns, whose laws, as personal 
 commandments, permitted no rival authority, no suspense 
 of faith, no balance of reasoning. In each of these reli- 
 gions an omnipotent Will, consciously engaged on the 
 affairs of men, was the centre of all motive, the sum of all 
 rights and claims. Creation was simply the act of that 
 Will ; sin was violation of its command ; hell was the con- 
 sequence of its wrath ; heaven was the reward of its ap- 
 proval. What man was and was to be, what right and 
 wrong meant, resulted directly from its determinations ; 
 and would have been other than they are, had these been 
 different. This absorption of all being into the sovereignty 
 of Will made each of the three contending religions es- 
 sentially intolerant. It must deal with all other religions 
 as rivals and foes ; and the more bitterly, the closer these 
 seemed to be to its own communion. For reasons already 
 
446 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 given, Judaism and Mazdeism came to an accommodation 
 without change of face. Between Judaism and Christian- 
 ity the hatred was mutual and made irreconcilable by ages 
 of Christian persecution, — perhaps the blackest page of 
 religious bigotry in the whole history of man, all in conse- 
 quence of supposed crimes against the person of Christ. 
 No peace ever dawned on the hates of Christianity and 
 Mazdeism, symbolized in the eternal strife of Persia and 
 Rome, But a mightier Will swallowed the will of Ahura ; 
 and then came for Christianity another and more deadly 
 conflict, lasting for ages, till at last Allah and Christ are 
 stilled by the new world-forces which command that reli- 
 gion shall cease to be the worship of wills, and become 
 the worship of universal principles and laws. 
 
 More intolerable, however, to Christianity than any out- 
 side rival personality was a system which arose within its 
 own household in rebellion against the authority not of 
 Christ onl}', but of Will itself. The system of Mani substi- 
 tuted principles for persons. This was the real though 
 scarcely recognized secret of the hate and fear. It was the 
 handwriting on the wall predicting death to arbitrary will 
 in the name of reason, and instinctively the Church sprang 
 to efface it. It is admitted that Mani was true to his Iran- 
 ian origin in his ready spring from abstractions to concrete 
 forms ; ^ that his conception of world-processes and cosmic 
 powers was dramatic, so that light and darkness were not 
 only opposite substances, but living powers contending in 
 space. But this was only the superficial poetic dress. He 
 emphasized principles, and gave them a logical develop- 
 ment inconsistent with personal caprice. He used Dualism 
 not as the conflict of two opposite wills, one of which must 
 triumph by the destruction of the other, but as the organic 
 structure of the world, whereof all personal life is but the 
 
 1 Spiegel has noticed this, but fails to see the deeper impersonality on which it rests. 
 Eran. Alterth., ii. 206. 
 
MANICH^EISM. 447 
 
 temporary expression. He laid the basis of his creed not 
 in intentional and positive commands, but in the logic of 
 essential causes. A true Gnostic, he put reason for out- 
 ward revelation, philosophy for special providence, and 
 creation itself was but a single sequence in the evolution 
 of the inherent relation of good and evil. This rationalism 
 was his unpardonable sin ; and his eclecticism, pressing 
 elements of all creeds into his service, not to aggrandize 
 a special God, but to work out his principles on the broad- 
 est human scale, was simply an aggravation of it. We may 
 here briefly illustrate our statement, before proceeding to 
 that larger demonstration which its novelty may seem to 
 require. 
 
 Light and Darkness, or Good and Evil, in the Manichaean 
 system, although defined respectively as spirit and matter, 
 were not distinguished as spiritual and material in our sense 
 of those terms. Light was not separated, as purely con- 
 scious mind, from Darkness, as dead elemental substance. 
 The moral distinction of good and evil controlled that dif- 
 ference. Although coarser and cruder than light, darkness 
 was not confined to bodies ; although more spiritual than 
 darkness, light was not confined to spirits. The two 
 opposites were Principles, without beginning and without 
 end. The will of the Manichaean Christ could not destroy 
 the Darkness, which remained after the element of Light 
 had been mainly eliminated, and though buried out of 
 sight it was kept in place by powers not free from the in- 
 termixture of evil with good. Its relation to man ceased, 
 but not its essential reality as the opposite of good. 
 
 Evil, in Mazdeism infused from without into man to cor- 
 rupt his native purity, is in Manichaeism an organic part 
 of him from the beginning, a principle developing itself 
 in conjunction with good, the darkness that ever co-exists 
 with the light; not the work of a personal tempter, not 
 the product of a fall from obedience. If this antagonism 
 
448 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 exists, reasoned Mani, how should it come but from the 
 nature of things? A personal Will cannot have created 
 good and evil, since its very life is in being conformed to 
 one or the other. Neither can it end the evil which it did 
 not create, except so far as to separate the good which is 
 imprisoned in evil, and leave the last a barren principle of 
 darkness, self-existing but inoperative on man. Behind all 
 plans and purposes lies the unchangeable nature of things. 
 It is the natural tendency of evil to mingle with good, and 
 imprison it; of good, to escape the evil mingled with it, 
 into purity and freedom. Hence a universe whose imper- 
 fect and struggling condition represents these opposing 
 forces. And of these man is the product, — an imprisoned 
 light-essence, involved in darkness, seeking its native ele- 
 ment, aided by the whole world of Light, held back by the 
 whole world of Darkness, — who at length through the per- 
 vasion of the whole universe by the all-mastering suffering 
 of the soul of Humanity, as the Son of Man, is delivered 
 from the bondage of the night into the liberty of eternal 
 day. And thus, though the strife is dramatically set forth, 
 and every stage is crowded with stirring and strenuous Will, 
 though every cosmic force centres in a living conscious 
 energy, — in /Eons and emanations and spiritual powers, 
 — and the speech of the whole is one mighty symbolism 
 of spirit and matter, of the senses and the soul, still every 
 step is predetermined, not by any monarchical scheme, but 
 by the antagonisms and masteries of Nature. The light 
 must free itself from the darkness, because each is what it 
 is. No personal favoritism alters the course of Nature. 
 According as each man is in relation to this supreme law 
 of spiritual progress, so is his fate. This stands in place 
 of election and reprobation; this, not the Bible or the 
 Gospels, is the revelation; this, not the personal trinity 
 in unity, is the witness of the spirit; this, not incarnation 
 in a body of sense, is the presence of the Christ; this 
 
MANICH/EISM. 449 
 
 doctrine, not his life or death, is the power of salvation. 
 All prophets and gods sink before this. Jahveh is degraded 
 into the tempter of Adam, while the serpent becomes a 
 saviour because he teaches the rights of knowledge above 
 arbitrary commands, leading man into the liberty of the 
 light instead of the bondage of the darkness. The visible 
 Christ of tradition is a mere shadow; the true Christ was 
 not crucified, because the spiritual light cannot, as a prin- 
 ciple, be so confined and slain in forms of sense. The true 
 Christ was sent at the beginning, to save the imprisoned 
 light, and is invisibly crucified throughout Nature, so long 
 as the light-principle is not set free. As for Ahura, Mani, 
 though Mazdean in so many things, does not mention him 
 as a sovereign Will, or hesitate to set aside his positive com- 
 mands, — ^such as marriage, labor, agriculture, and, in gen- 
 eral, reconcilement with the physical conditions of life. 
 
 It is then evident, that with all its errors Manich^ism was 
 a rationalistic criticism, cutting under church, creed, and es- 
 tablished mediator; an attempt to substitute ideas {gjiosis) 
 for blind faith {pistis) and a religious philosophy for the 
 worship of personal Will. This was equally true of Gnos- 
 ticism in general, of which Manichasism was an offshoot, — 
 the great heresy of the early Church, the noble witness 
 that reason appeared with its radical claims at the very 
 earliest steps of Christian absorption in the worship of 
 Christ. But the Gnostics were never persecuted so fiercely 
 as the disciples of Mani ; partly because they affiliated 
 more perfectly with existing mystical systems, Oriental 
 and Platonic, from which they derived a certain prestige 
 of respect; and partly because some of the doctrines of 
 Mani, proceeding chiefly from contempt of the senses and 
 of matter in general, were urged with a logical as well as 
 a practical thoroughness which struck out the whole basis 
 of Christian theology, especially the Incarnation and 
 Atonement, from physical and social reality. Moreover, 
 
 29 
 
450 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 Other doctrines of Mani very conspicuously associated 
 themselves with what had passed for heathen idolatry, — 
 such as that of a spiritual presence and purifying function 
 in the sun and moon. 
 
 A detailed study of Manichaiism will show that, notwith- 
 standing its important differences from Mazdeism as well 
 as from Christianity, it was a natural product of those 
 Iranian qualities which we have traced through the races 
 and religions successively appearing on Iranian soil. Ideal 
 aspiration was indeed much more characteristic of Mani- 
 chaeism than the worship of personal Will. Yet both these 
 forms of Iranian nerve-energy had their share in its origin 
 and history. Its recognition of ideal principles as the 
 substance of belief was enfeebled by anthropomorphic 
 elements, shared with both these religions, though by no 
 means in equal degree on its part. Its superiority in the 
 line of the ideal explains their evil treatment of it, while 
 the modicum of personalism inseparable from its dramatic 
 and poetic form assisted it to gain influence in an age 
 which was drifting towards religious monarchism of a very 
 positive kind. Of all heresiarchs, none perhaps stands 
 more in need of just appreciation than Mani. His doc- 
 trine, a by-word in all Christian ages, has come down 
 only in fragments and in the writings of his enemies, 
 who took care to destroy the originals from which they 
 quoted for purposes of confutation alone. Beausobre, the 
 one great scholar of modern times who has ventured to 
 deal with Manicha^ism in detail, was far from sympathiz- 
 ing with it; yet his minute researches resulted in finding 
 Mani in almost every respect superior to his opponents, 
 both Pagan and Christian. It is no slight honor to this 
 despised and hated creed that it should have given oc- 
 casion, after a thousand years' eclipse, for a work of such 
 rare learning and liberality,^ not only one of the best reha- 
 
 ' Beausobre : Histoire du Mankhceisme. 
 
MANICH^EISM. 
 
 451 
 
 bilitations of discredited names, but a firm and fearless as- 
 sertion of the rights of free inquiry. The estimate of Baur, 
 though more philosophical, does not give so vivid an im- 
 pression of the man or the system as this great and per- 
 manent contribution to the study of those times. To this 
 I am indebted for a considerable portion of the data here- 
 after adduced in support of my own views on aspects 
 of the subject into which Beausobre hardly enters, — its 
 bearing on the progress of religion and the problem of 
 evil. 
 
 As a recognition of the strife of contrary forces in the 
 physical and moral spheres, Dualism may well be called a 
 universal experience. Its symbols are everywhere, — God 
 and Satan, Osiris and Typhon, Ahura and Ahriman, 
 Jove and the Titans, spirit and matter, monad and dryad, 
 order and chaos, " love and strife," ^ affirmation and ne- 
 gation, polar forces, astrological oppositions, freedom and 
 force, spiritual and sensual tendency. Diverse as are these 
 forms, Dualism is nevertheless the promoter of pure mono- 
 theism, in proportion as it distinctly emphasizes the radical 
 opposition of good and evil. For in the same proportion 
 that it does this, it forces man to realize that supreme mean- 
 ing which he attaches to the word good, which in the last 
 analysis means that which is conformable to the truth of his 
 being, and commands his love and service. In treating of 
 the Dualism of the Avesta, I maintained that it was impos- 
 sible for men to worship at once two equal and essentially 
 hostile gods; in other words, that strict Dualism belongs 
 to the realm of philosophy rather than to that of religion. 
 In the religious sense, one cannot serve two opposite mas- 
 ters ; " For either he will hate the one and love the other, 
 or else he will hold to the one and despise the other." 
 There are of course incongruities in conduct and in belief 
 everywhere ; polytheism in a certain sense belongs to no 
 
 ^ Empedocles. 
 
452 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 special creed or age. But in so far as evil is distinctly 
 conceived as a power hostile to good, then, however it may- 
 be feared or detested, it is not worshipped as supreme ; 
 because as evil it cannot command either affection or re- 
 spect. So, whatever the form under which good is con- 
 ceived, — whether as truth, progress, righteousness, sacrifice, 
 or some kind of happiness, — the idea of its right and ulti- 
 mate destiny to be supreme, is made all the more evident, 
 the more clearly the conception of evil is brought home, 
 as its radical opposite and negative. When what is held 
 to be good is felt to lie in the purpose of one power, and 
 what is held to be evil in the purpose of another, then a 
 dualistic philosophy necessitates monotheistic faith ; or, in 
 other words, the former must be superior and substantially 
 supreme, and so God. Ahura was superior to Ahriman, 
 though their strife lasted to the end of the present visible 
 world. If here monotheism was not complete, it was be- 
 cause of the strictly personal meaning of deity, dividing 
 the conception, so that an inferior person could bo called 
 a god as well as a supreme one. In a definition by prin- 
 ciples, only the sovereign good in the universe can be 
 called God. 
 
 In this respect Manichaism was more truly monothe- 
 istic than Mazdeism. Its supreme good was conceived as 
 a principle of immaterial light, whereof all spiritual forces 
 of good were emanations. This was "the Father;" Son 
 and Spirit were inferior, divine only as partakers of this. 
 But so entirely did it subordinate personality to essence, 
 that the opposing power of evil, though regarded in the 
 same way as a living agent, was defined as Matter; as if 
 personification of a principle was, in this dramatic and 
 poetic system, symbolical only, — as in the case of JMatter it 
 must be. The dualism here is not a division of deity into 
 two persons, but a distinction of principles; only one of 
 which is the supreme good, and therefore God. 
 
MANICH^ISM. 453 
 
 But SO absolute is this supremacy of good, that the very- 
 key to Manichaiism is in its effort to avoid all intermixture 
 of matter, or evil, with the nature of God as a pure and 
 incorruptible essence, whose unity it was willing to express 
 by the Christian name of " the Father." This effort is 
 admitted by its enemies.^ The Platonists, severe critics 
 of the Manichaeans, conceded that they had " invented 
 their monstrous fables, which degrade deity, out of a re- 
 ligious reverence for God." ^ As it would have contra- 
 dicted the absolute purity of good to create evil, therefore 
 evil — which by a large part of the ancient world, Christian 
 as well as Heathen,-'^ was identified with matter — must be 
 an uncreated, self-existent principle. This was Gnostic; 
 Bardesanes, for instance, had said, " God creates the world, 
 but evil creates itself." But the Christians, who felt the 
 same instinctive sense of impurity in matter, made no 
 such effort to save their God from the responsibility of 
 having created it. Mani quoted against them on this 
 point their own text, " A good tree cannot bring forth 
 evil fruit," and Paul's doctrine of the irreconcilableness 
 of the flesh with the spirit. He denied their explanation 
 of the world as a creation out of nothing by the will of 
 God; since "out of nothing, nothing can come." The 
 world of light, or good, flows from the nature of God, 
 which is light; but the world of darkness, or evil, can 
 only flow from its own nature; hence both are uncre- 
 ated ; and the good is only good, and makes good only. 
 
 The reality of uncreated, self-existent principles was a 
 common tenet in ancient philosophy, as distinguished from 
 religion. Upon the same requirement, that nothing could 
 come from nothing, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece 
 held one and another of the four elements to be without 
 
 ^ Epiphaniiis, Jerome, etc. See Beausobre : Hist, du Mnnichirisnic, ii. 147. 
 
 ^ Simplicius in Epictet. cap. xxvii. 
 
 ' Sabellius and probably Arnobius believed this, as well as the Gnostics generally. 
 
454 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 beginning, constituting the essential nature of things. So 
 the " matter " of Plato, the " atoms " of Epicurus, the 
 "strife and lov^e " of Empcdocles, the Hellenic "destiny" 
 as well as the Gnostic " matter," were principles inherent 
 and primal, beyond the will of the highest gods. And 
 the " mind " {nans') of Anaxagoras was a principle rather 
 than a definite person. In the same way Mani, urging 
 the traditional belief that spiritual freedom consisted in 
 emancipation from the bonds of sense, in an intensely 
 ethical spirit affirmed the impossibility that matter should 
 proceed from the supreme good either by creation or 
 emanation, because it was the principle of evil. It was 
 therefore out of jealousy for the purity of the religious 
 ideal that he pronounced matter to be eternal, or un- 
 created, as to its substance, and its special forms to have 
 been shaped by an inferior maker, or Demiurge, out of pre- 
 existent materials. So Plato is at pains to show that evil 
 docs not come from the gods ; ^ and is as little the work 
 of man, since it was necessitated by a principle of disorder 
 which the good Demiurge could not wholly overcome. 
 The Platonic Demiurge represents the higher, as the Mani- 
 chaean does the lower, creative force. It is not easy to 
 see how, upon the recognized Christian as well as Gnostic 
 ground that evil was real and positive, and that it was 
 made effective through the solicitations of the senses, 
 Mani could have so well recognized in any other way the 
 logic of reason and the absolute purity of the highest 
 good. Certainly not in the method of his great opponent, 
 Augustine, the father of Christian theology, who says with 
 Plato that nothing can be more detestable than to make 
 God the author of evil ; yet who, so far from freeing Him 
 from personal responsibility for evil, ascribes it to the 
 human will, whereof, as the bitter foe of Pelagianism, he 
 declares God himself to be the absolute creator and con- 
 
MANICH^ISM. 455 
 
 troller. Certainly not in the way of Christian theology, 
 which made God the Creator and Father of all, yet cast 
 the victims of these forces of evil, which are part and 
 parcel of human life, into eternal punishment by the 
 Father's will. 
 
 In resorting to the more consistent view of evil, con- 
 sidered as real and essential, that it must be thoroughly 
 separated from the nature of God, and from the ultimate 
 destiny of spiritual substance, Mani was the most thor- 
 ough protestant against the irrationalities of the Christian 
 creed in that whole line of heresiarchs who founded the 
 Gnostic schools of the first three centuries. He followed 
 out the same substantial ideas as Basilides, Marcion, Bar- 
 desanes, and Valentinus, and had many points of sympathy 
 with those minor schools which formed the transition from 
 Jewish Christianity to Gnosticism. In respect to the na- 
 ture of evil and of matter, their errors are obvious. 
 
 As supplying a rationale (gnosis) of philosophy, to meet 
 demands which the blind faith {pistis') of the Church 
 not only failed to satisfy, but even treated as sinful, 
 they occupy a position much higher than belongs to 
 their solution of this and of many other problems of life. 
 Augustine charges Mani with attempting to reach truth by 
 reason without faith ; and this, taking faith in Augustine's 
 sense, is his real glory. The character of his criticism 
 both of the creed and books of Christianity, of the Old 
 Testament and the New, singularly anticipates many of 
 the arguments against Biblical and doctrinal authority 
 which modern science has carried into details then unat- 
 tainable, and which modern rationalism has found most 
 satisfactory in disproving the genuineness of certain books 
 and the claims of internal evidence. His use of texts 
 shows what opposite meanings may be read into the 
 same words by a system of philosophy, and by a system 
 of implicit faith ; but it does not appear that the charge of 
 
456 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 corrupting the language of Scripture has any other basis 
 than his choice of those passages only which served his 
 purpose of confutation or defence. His claim that reason 
 was the emancipating power, that the strength of sin was 
 in ignorance, that the power of Christ was in his doctrine, 
 not in his life, — a purely spiritual reality not at all re- 
 vealed in the illusory body of flesh and blood which men 
 called Jesus, was a complete repudiation of the Christian 
 doctrine of the Fall, of original sin, of compulsory belief 
 through miracle, of exclusive incarnation, and of the whole 
 scheme of salvation based thereon. And the inspiration 
 of this whole effort to adjust the religious traditions of 
 the East to the requirements of reason, was the desire to 
 vindicate the ideal purity and perfection of the Supreme 
 Good. 
 
 This is the substantial motive of his idea of a Demiurge, 
 or subordinate creator, applied to Jahveh as the God of 
 the Old Testament and framer of the material world. 
 His objections to this Old Testament religion were based 
 on its unworthy anthropomorphisms ; on its bloody sacri- 
 fices, which he held to be of demonic origin ; on its wholly 
 temporal and visible meaning of reward and punishment; 
 on its circumcision and ceremonialism ; on the absence of 
 all prophecy concerning the real Christ ; on the absurdity of 
 using its types as authority for belief in a divine commis- 
 sion ; on the ground that a maker of visible light could not 
 have been the Infinite God, because he would have been in 
 darkness previous to making it. Faustus, the Manichsean 
 apologist, could not believe that the Son of God should 
 have been first and specially sent to the Jews; nor under- 
 stand how the heathen should not believe that he had 
 shown his grace to their own ancestors as well.-^ These 
 objections to the anthropomorphism of the Old Testa- 
 ment are evidences of an earnest zeal for free spirituality 
 
 1 Beausobre : Hist, du Manichceisme, i. 296. 
 
MANICH/EISM. 457 
 
 and ethical purity in the conception of God,^ similar to 
 that which Alexandrian Judaism itself had contributed 
 more than a hundred years before to the earliest Chris- 
 tian belief 
 
 In the same interest of spiritualism Mani denied the 
 resurrection of the body, — a heresy both to Mazdeism and 
 Christianity; and it was for this, not for his Dualism, that 
 he was put to death by Varahran. 
 
 Let us now examine more closely the meaning of the 
 Manichaean principle of evil. "Matter," it must be noted, 
 is not here what the common speech, still less the science, 
 of modern times calls by that name. It is simply a term for 
 the substance of those forces which men found impossible 
 to reconcile with their moral and spiritual ideal. It was 
 in great degree identified with the bodily senses and their 
 immediate relations to man, not only because of the sen- 
 sual appetites, but in part certainly because it was recog- 
 nized that the ideal world is not revealed physically, by 
 observations, but transcendentally, from within ; because 
 the senses do not really account for the sense of duty 
 and the idea of God. The inexplicable ground of physi- 
 cal and moral imperfection was conceived, with some 
 approach to philosophical truth, as elementary disorder, 
 blind chaotic darkness in contrast with the light of rea- 
 son, order, truth, and good ; which, according to Plato's 
 noble maxim, was only suppressed by blindness, and only 
 needed being seen, to be loved. This is substantially 
 the "necessity" which Plato in his " Timzeus " opposes to 
 the principle of good, and which limits the power of the 
 Demiurge to shape out of his pre-existent material an 
 orderly world, and souls conformable to the best. It is 
 a principle irreducible to permanent form, and necessitates 
 evil in man and Nature, whose organisms spring from 
 
 * So in Alexandrian philosophy and the translation of the Septuagint a hundred years 
 previous. 
 
458 PHILOSOPHIES.. 
 
 human degeneracy. This elementary darkness, or blind 
 unreasoning capability of evil, was called " matter " by 
 ancient thinkers, — Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, — and forms 
 a distinct factor in all their cosmogony and ethics. On this 
 principle as inherent in the cosmos Mani took his stand 
 in opposition to the Christian theory, which had made the 
 Supreme Good responsible, as a personal Will, for moral 
 evil, because defining it as a product of that human will 
 which He had created. As a principle evil was eternally 
 separate from the principle of good, and could not be 
 explained by anything outside of itself, least of all by its 
 moral opposite. Now, when modern thought says evil is a 
 necessity, as the imperfection which is involved in the very 
 nature of finitencss, and which no Will, however exalted, 
 could prevent, or was needed to create ; when it says crea- 
 tion proper, a pure beginning of principles in time, is con- 
 trary to the law of evolution, and, in truth, inconceivable, 
 — what is it but to reaffirm that ancient doctrine of the 
 "eternity of matter" under a scientific form? 
 
 The Manichaeans criticised the first verse of Genesis by 
 asking what God was doing before that " beginning " in 
 which he created the heavens and the earth. -^ Some of 
 the Fathers had enough of heathen philosophy in them to 
 reply, — after Heraclitus and the Stoics, the Alexandrians 
 and the Cabalists, — that the present system, terrestrial and 
 celestial, was but one in a succession of systems ; that God 
 was eternally producing these ; and they added, with less 
 plausibility, that the world previous to this present world 
 was a spiritual one, created by instant fiat, and that it 
 was to this that Moses referred, as created " in the begin- 
 ning." But it is obvious that this doctrine of successive 
 creations was as far from giving the meaning of the verse 
 in question, as it was from meeting the Manichsean objec- 
 tion to its theory of creation out of nothing. Nor was the 
 
 ^ Aiigiisline : Agai>ist the Manicheeans, i. 2. 
 
MANICH/EISM. 459 
 
 matter improved by the further attempt of Augustine and 
 Clement of Alexandria to read into the poetic phrase of 
 Genesis their doctrine of the Trinity, by explaining ev ap-x^rj 
 (" in the beginning ") to mean " by the principle," — that 
 is, the " Word," or " Son of God " ! ^ 
 
 It was natural for the orthodox advocate to ask how it 
 was possible, if evil (or matter) was so wholly apart from 
 the will of God, that he should exert any influence to 
 redeem those under its power. But Mani could at least 
 have replied that this was quite as conceivable as it was 
 that the Christian God, being infinitely good, should have 
 created matter, and its involved evil, by his perfect will. 
 Moreover, the mingling of good and evil in the world was 
 not an interfusion of principles at all, but a contact and 
 external pressure, of the nature of two hostile and in- 
 compatible substances at war, — a mutual imprisonment, 
 necessitating final separation and release. 
 
 In the dramatic spirit of their system the Manichaeans 
 personified their Evil Principle, as we have said. But their 
 Prince of Darkness was not a form of rationality, for this 
 belonged only to light; nor had he so much freedom and 
 intelligence as Ahriman in the Mazdean system, who is 
 outwitted by Ahura, and sees no danger till it is too late 
 to escape; nor was he so genuinely personal as the Chris- 
 tian Satan, who prescribes the conditions of life and the 
 fate of men by personal presence and direct volition. He 
 is simply the poetic personification of that blind chaotic 
 substance which needs no will to move it, but is itself 
 active, productive, — a push and tendency of things. To 
 give a soul to this element was quite according to Orien- 
 tal psychology ; since soul-life was traditionally conceived 
 as of three orders, — rational, psychical, and animal or ma- 
 terial, — and all the world as animated in every detail of 
 element and form.^ The Talmud also had its Prince of 
 
 ' Beausobre : Hisi. du ManichcBtsme, ii. 284. ^ Ibid., 369. 
 
460 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 Matter, opposed to God. And the early Christians thought 
 that in repelhng matter they were fighting off the evil de- 
 mons, who were its effective constituent force. 
 
 But there was a stronger reason for giving to the ma- 
 terial principle opposed to good a soul, in Manichaean 
 jealousy for the purity of the principle of good. If evil 
 were wholly dead and impersonal, then, how account for 
 its presence as conscious motive in the heart and will 
 of man? It must have proceeded either from a spirit- 
 capacity in matter, or else, which was impossible, from a 
 capacity for evil in that spiritual principle which was held 
 to be the Supreme Good. And so the dark world of the 
 material principle must in a sense be spiritual, and pro- 
 ductive of living forces, which people chaos and make 
 war on the light. The opposite realms are in contact 
 only at the border, and the dark world is at the south, 
 as with the Orientals generally. Unlike their being, as 
 opposites, which is eternal, their strife, the grand drama 
 of which creation and human destiny are incidents, has a 
 beginning in time, as it has an end. This tragedy is ex- 
 pressed by Mani, as by all religious teachers, in a mythic 
 form, which must not be too literally interpreted. 
 
 In this mythus he is consistent with his Platonic idea of 
 the origin of moral evil, not in inclination, but in ignorance ; 
 and vindicates the all-sufficiency of light (or reason) to 
 deliver the soul. Like Basilides, and in accord with the 
 Avestan Magi,^ he ascribed the war to the effort of dark- 
 ness to find light, led by a necessity to mingle with it. 
 The darkness is- not intentionally hostile to the light as 
 light, but simply does not know the light. An internal 
 schism, plainly suggesting the deeper Dualism in the 
 bosom of evil which portends its destruction, caused it to 
 transcend its own limits and overflow into the world of 
 light, not from sympathy indeed, but from necessity, as the 
 
 ^ Beausobre, ii. 23. Archelaus : Disptitatio cum I^tanete, c. 55. 
 
MANICH^ISM. ^^^^. 461 
 
 only relief. I shall leave unanswered the natural question, 
 How far does this doctrine involve what it certainly hints, 
 — the psychological truth that evil, through its self-con- 
 tradiction, conies to know the right, and sees it clearly, 
 only after vainly struggling to overcome it? 
 
 Blindly flowing into the light, unable to hide from it, 
 evil cannot refuse the conflict, whose sure issue is its 
 defeat. Now, the very substance of the human — not the 
 human body, which comes of dumb demons, according to 
 Mani — is shaped from the substance of the Supreme Light, 
 by what the myth calls the Mother of Life (in other 
 words, the principle or power of life proceeding from it), 
 purely to repel this flooding of its world by the darkness, 
 this raid of chaos upon order, this blind push of lower 
 tendency beyond its bounds. So exalted is the human in 
 its ideal significance, in its nature and its purpose, — pure 
 light-essence in finite form ! 
 
 And when, in the unequal conflict, this finite image of 
 God is like to fail, the Living Spirit is at hand with the 
 boundless resources of the Father to rescue him. The 
 demonic forces are subdued, and many of them bound in 
 stars or in planets, the evil powers of Oriental cosmogony. 
 Or does the choice of stars signify their imprisonment in 
 light f — the sign of that crippled condition of evil in the 
 world which constantly guarantees the final triumph of good. 
 
 All this is in the ideal world, not that of human history. 
 The Mother of Life is the Wisdom {Sophia) of the Gnos- 
 tics ; but who, instead of falling like her from the bosom 
 of God, an yEon wandering in the darkness, goes forth to 
 resist the darkness, yet does not enter its impure domain. 
 And her offspring, the ideal type of man (the Adam- 
 Kadmon of the Cabala, Gaybmard of the Avesta), who 
 contends with evil directly, is saved by the Living Spirit 
 to the world of essential light. But now a portion of this 
 divine humanity, made captive, is imprisoned in the lower 
 
462 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 world, and pervades it, — the perpetual stress of the spirit 
 therein towards deliverance into native light. This is the 
 Son of Man, the "Jesus passibilis," of Manichasan Chris- 
 tianity; the free ideal of which, a portion (or child), is 
 enthroned serene in the perfect visible light of the sun 
 and moon, to draw all purified intelligences out of the 
 world of evil into the gates of light. The Avestan Mithra 
 becomes the Manichaean Christ.^ 
 
 Now opens the proper history of man, — the sequel of a 
 strife already substantially decided. Not a blind conflict 
 of uncertain issue, not one fore-ordained by an arbitrary 
 decree of Divine Will to be half deliverance and half doom, 
 but a sublime foregone conclusion, based on the elements 
 of being. 
 
 Out of the issues of that first hostile intermixture of 
 good and evil, comes the visible actual world, — sun and 
 moon from the elements purest from darkness; stars from 
 those less pure ; plants and inorganic substances from 
 those still more corrupted; then Man, the actual human 
 race, not the ideal, male and female, with body of dark- 
 ness and soul of light, in whose composition centres that 
 most pertinent question. Why was permitted such inter- 
 mixture of evil in all we are and see? — and the Mani- 
 chrcan answer, namely. That something great and good 
 should come of the inherent antagonism of good and evil 
 in the nature of things. The natural enmity of matter to 
 spirit should by their conjunction in man be made to 
 work out the triumph of good. The dark powers^, fearing 
 to lose the captive light, form a body in the image of the 
 ideal man, in which they imprison it, ignorant that in the 
 very law of its nature it must struggle to escape these 
 bonds, until darkness should be penetrated by order, and 
 disciplines yield victory over the flesh. This is Adam 
 the microcosmic man, — evil in body, good in soul. 
 
 * Neander: Church History, — "Man! and the Manicheans." 
 
MANICH^ISM. 463 
 
 Thus did Manichaeism follow out logically the doctrine 
 of the impurity of the senses, deeply rooted in the religions 
 of the time, not less in the Christian than in the heathen ; 
 not less in the call of the one to renounce a doomed world 
 for the kingdom of God, than in the old philosophy of 
 spirit and matter. Now, the significance of Judaism was, 
 that it was the effort of the dark power concerned in crea- 
 tion to prevent man from escaping these material bonds : 
 first, by forbidding him to eat of the tree of knowledge 
 (and here he is saved by a good angel in the form of the 
 serpent) ; and next by making him, through Eve, the subject 
 of sexual concupiscence, that the element of light might by 
 generation be divided and so impaired, and the memory of 
 his original home in spiritual light be effaced. But this 
 effacement was impossible, and the undying affinity forever 
 prompts to freedom. This redeeming idea Mani did not, 
 it is probable, develop into Platonic " reminiscence ; " but 
 the system seems to involve something like that principle 
 of the immanent life of the ideal in man. Instead of the 
 transmission of the sin of Adam as federal head of the 
 human race, placing all under the ban of moral impotence, 
 Mani seems to have asserted a power in each of his de- 
 scendants to resist the ever-repeated first temptation, by 
 virtue of the light-element which constitutes his spiritual 
 nature. Thus the whole history of mankind before Jesus, 
 became lighted up with personal sainthood ; and in a larger 
 sense than that of the Christian creed of redemption, the 
 light shone from the East unto the West. Mani recog- 
 nized the continual renewal of the holy flame through 
 prophets in every age and religion, the greatest of whom 
 he, as a Christian, of course found in Jesus Christ, but with- 
 out regarding him at all in the Christian sense. Although 
 the very genius of light, coming into the darkness from the 
 heaven of the primal ideal Man, to teach men the way to 
 the light, his work was not to bring any atoning or.vicari- 
 
464 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 ous salvation by his life or death, but simply to revive the 
 forgotten light in darkened eyes, and show the science 
 {gnosis) of deliverance from the snares of evil.^ Here is 
 a marvellous conjunction, — Buddha's " ignorance " as the 
 root of misery, with the " light shining in darkness" of the 
 Gospel of John. 
 
 This was a total rejection of the function of Christ in 
 view of the Christian idea of the nature and consequences 
 of sin; but there was even a more fatal heresy in the 
 denial of the reality of his incarnation. For the pure 
 Hght to assume a real fleshly body was impossible. The 
 Manichaian Christ could neither eat, drink, suffer, nor 
 die; the Jesus of the creed was therefore no incarnate 
 God, but an illusory phantasm only ; the work of the 
 Christ was invisible and spiritual ; and the " Jesus pas- 
 sibilis," or all pervading light-element imprisoned in Na- 
 ture, was an effort to escape matter, not an assumption of 
 its forms. 
 
 To say the least, the Docetic Christ of Mani was not 
 more irrational than the transmutation of the eucharistic ele- 
 ments into the actual flesh and blood of deity. Although 
 he did not escape the absurd notion of a phantasmal organ 
 proclaiming real and saving doctrine, and probably had 
 no clear idea whether the miracles, sufferings, and other 
 phenomena declared to be phantasmal were pure illu- 
 sion, or whether, being objectively real, they were merely 
 unreal as concerning the light-principle which could not 
 take bodily form, — the meaning of Mani w^as evidently 
 this: that as "flesh and blood could not inherit the king- 
 dom of God," nor the light-beam of the spirit be cut off 
 from its fountain by absorption in matter, so the supposed 
 incarnation in the person of Jesus was no exception to this 
 law, and that the reality of Christ's coming to save men 
 
 ^ " Mani's world history, not Jewish nor Persian, but apparently Babylonian." — Spiegel : 
 Eran. Altirth., ii. p. 222. 
 
MANICH/EISM. 465 
 
 was a fact of the invisible, spiritual world alone. This, not- 
 withstanding all the ascetic extravagance we may find in its 
 Christian premises, was at least sounder in its conclusion 
 than the opposite extreme of faith, which broke away from 
 that premise by an astounding form of miraculous person- 
 ality, and announced this overwhelming exception to be the 
 most supremely real thing in human history. Taking the 
 Christian belief that the visible world was under doom of 
 speedy destruction, and that the kingdom of its Christ was 
 not of it, but of another world, — was not Mani right in 
 counting it an illusion, and the coming of the Christ into 
 subjection to its bonds the greatest illusion of all? The 
 protest of Mani was at least timely as against those ten- 
 dencies in Christianity towards a belief in the corporeality 
 of God, of which the natural development led to the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of the Real Presence. 
 
 But he did not deny an apparent assumption of the 
 flesh. He even found a purpose in the illusions, so far 
 as he accepted them as historical ; they represented, by 
 way of figure, the relations and duties of those who really 
 were bound in the flesh, — the crucifixion showing that 
 man must mortify the body, the resurrection suggesting 
 his immortality, and the ascension his return to his native 
 light. But the Incarnation being denied, there could 
 have been no miraculous birth of the man Jesus, and no 
 resurrection of his physical body, — an evidence of the 
 freedom with which the Christian records were read and 
 criticised in the early centuries of the Church.^ Faustus, 
 the Manichaean bishop, deemed it the height of unreason 
 that one born of a woman, circumcised as a Jew, baptized 
 as a disciple, led into the desert to be tempted of the Devil 
 in ordinary human ways, should yet be called the only be- 
 
 1 Faustus, Augustine's opponent, denied the authenticity of many of the New Testament 
 books, and referred them to a post-apostolic date. The main ground of the charge brought 
 against their contents iiy this school, that they were corruptions of earlier writings, was their 
 anthropomorphic character. 
 
 30 
 
466 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 gotten Son of God, one with the Father, and Life of the 
 World.i 
 
 The Manich^an Jesus was that portion of the hght- 
 substance of the ideal Man which had remained captive 
 in the world of darkness, or matter, when that soul had 
 been rescued by the Living Spirit and exalted to the sun. 
 This was the " Jesus passibilis," pervading the visible 
 world for the mystical imagination, with the presence of 
 a divine endeavor to ascend out of the flesh into the spirit. 
 " This Jesus," said the Manichaean, " was not crucified on 
 Calvary; he hangs on every tree." In what manner he 
 pervaded Nature does not seem clear, but doubtless invisi- 
 bly only; and yet, as captive in matter, very differently 
 from the free descent of the Son of Man from his Sun- 
 world to bring his doctrine (or gnosis) in a merely appar- 
 ent form of humanity. But the meaning is plain enough. 
 Man's own ideal life, like the Fravashi of the Avesta, suffers 
 and strives for and with him in every element of Nature, 
 out of which he must wrest his lost liberty and light. 
 
 For emancipation was the recovery of a lost heaven, the 
 reunion of the divine light in man with the supreme light, 
 of which it came. This belief, common to all the ideal 
 schools of antiquity and the mystics of all ages, is an 
 expression of that cyclic movement ascribed by man to 
 whatever he holds to be inherent and eternal. Principles, 
 virtues, truth and good, tend through all changes of human 
 experience to bring us back to themselves, and reaffirm for 
 us in the end what they affirmed in the beginning, abiding 
 as they have always been till the world comes round to 
 them again. It is nothing less than a homelike sense of 
 essential relation, of inmost affinity, of inalienable right to 
 truth and good, which can thus absorb all distinctions of 
 time, and make them appear at once as remembrance and 
 prophecy, as what we were at the first and what we shall 
 
 ' Beausobre, ii. 509. 
 
MANICIL^ISM. 467 
 
 be at the last. The ideal in man seeks only what belongs 
 to it, its home, its nature, which it can never lose but by- 
 annihilation. The historical cyclic form assumed by this 
 feeling, the sense of a lost heaven to be recovered, may be 
 only a mythological symbol. But even an age which looks 
 not backwards but forwards, and conceives of life purely 
 as ascending evolution, will not escape this necessity of 
 ideal aspiration to transcend all time-conceptions, — this 
 sense of unchangeable identity with the principles which 
 attract it as its own natural and only home. The dream 
 of an ante-natal lapse from spiritual light, and a predes- 
 tined recovery of the same, which haunted antiquity, was 
 the measure of its loyalty to the ideal as inherent and eter- 
 nal reality. Nothing can be more significant than the find- 
 ing of this doctrine in dualistic schools like that of Mani, 
 which held evil to be an eternal principle ; a doctrine which 
 at first sight seems almost pure pessimism. That it was 
 as far as possible from this has already become apparent. 
 For Mani, as for Plato, and for many of the Christian 
 Fathers, immortality implied pre-existence, and pre-exist- 
 ence required immortality. The soul should recover the 
 use of her wings, now folded and bound, and resume the 
 lost power of flight. In ancient thought, the evil of mat- 
 ter was generally combined with the loss and recovery of 
 spiritual wings. On the other hand, the doctrine of evil 
 as inherent in the spiriUial nature of man, tended to that 
 of an entire destruction of these wings implied in the 
 notion of eternal punishment, from which no scheme of 
 redemption could save. Thus in the Christian dogma 
 immortality lost its connection with pre-existence. It is 
 remarkable that the two great advocates of pre-existence 
 in early Christian history (Origen and Mani), both held 
 to be heretics, though in different degrees, should, while 
 differing strongly in general belief, both have insisted that 
 immortality involved the restoration of every soul. It was 
 
468 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 related of Mani that when his system was charged with 
 cruelty in imprisoning souls in matter, he replied that 
 all the lost sheep would be restored to their folds. " God 
 forbid the soul should be lost. It is the lion that is taken 
 in the net by the shepherd who has thrown him a sheep ; 
 as for the soul, God will preserve it." ^ 
 
 This illustration opens a curious chapter in religious 
 history. There were other ways in which the delusion of 
 a natural depravity of the senses delivered the Manichaeans 
 from irrational Christian dogmas, which are deserving of 
 notice. They accepted the outer darkness and penal woes 
 of the last judgment by fire, but denied the resurrection of 
 the body and the millennial fictions of the Apocalypse and 
 the Fathers. Even while clothing spirits in the splendors 
 of the sun, they would have denied that these were in any 
 sense material, or had any affinity with the flesh and blood 
 in which these souls had dwelt while in life ; thus leaving 
 the whole question of spiritual form in the vagueness 
 which properly belongs to it. They admitted that death 
 was separation from the pleasures of sense, but for that 
 very reason denied that it was a primal curse, or, in fact, 
 an}-thing but a deliverance and second birth. They al- 
 lowed transmigration into plant and tree, and sun and 
 moon, as a purifying process, but had no harrowing pic- 
 tures of pits or lakes of fire for the wicked. They paid 
 honors to the sun and moon, thus happily escaping the 
 logical consequences of their hatred of matter, and erect- 
 ing the noblest strictly material forms in the universe into 
 symbols of the divine light.^ But the idolatry of which 
 the orthodox accused them on this account, even if real 
 to some extent, was certainly not so pronounced as that 
 w^hich was embodied in the worship of the body of Christ, 
 as such, or in that of the consecrated bread and wine 
 
 * Gregi : Aci. Disp. See Beausobre, ii. 338. 
 
 2 For other views of future punishment, see Spiegel, Eran. Alterth., ii. 195-232. 
 
MANICH/EISM. 469 
 
 as its equivalent, or in that of the relics of saints and 
 martyrs, through prayers, offerings, and vows. If idolatry 
 it could be called, this solar cult was at least rational 
 enough to take for its objects familiar blessings and natu- 
 ral laws. The Manichaeans, however, repelled the charge. 
 Faustus replied to his opponent, " God forbid I should 
 blush for the reverence I pay to the divine luminaries. 
 We have the same veneration for all elements which you 
 have for the elements of the Eucharist." ^ The sun was, 
 indeed, no less than the radiant company of purified souls, 
 in the glow of their garment of praise, ascending to that 
 " Pillar of Splendor " which was to be their eternal home. 
 Origen regarded the heavenly bodies as living souls, shining 
 in the light of good, and endowed with freedom of will, 
 whereby they prayed to God through Christ.^ But the 
 Manichaeans did not prostrate themselves before the sun, 
 nor offer it sacrifices as to God. They did not fall into 
 that image-worship which carried away the Church in the 
 fourth century. They placed an empty seat in their halls 
 of meeting in memory of their great teacher, but they did 
 not invoke him. In their celebration of the Eucharist they 
 used water instead of wine, and were regarded with horror 
 by the orthodox for this cause. 
 
 As the union of spirit and matter in the nature of man 
 involved a moral bondage of soul by sense, his sin, in the 
 Manichaean mind, was a result of his nature rather than 
 of his will. The orthodox attempt to reconcile these two 
 almost incompatible grounds of sin by definitions which 
 made them absolutely incompatible, — defining man's natu- 
 ral sin to be the organic, inevitable love of evil as evil and 
 hate of good as good, and his voluntary sin to be the 
 exercise of deliberate choice in being and doing what he 
 had just been declared as being and doing under irresist- 
 ible necessity, — was rejected by Mani. Human nature was 
 
 1 Augustine : Against Faitstus, xx. i, 2. ' De Principiis. 
 
470 PHILOSOPHIES, 
 
 far from being wholly depraved. Every soul was forever 
 prompted to free itself from the desires of the flesh through 
 its original participation in the divine light-nature of the 
 " primitive Man," or ideal Humanity. This spiritual es- 
 sence, shrouded in self-ignorance, cannot wholly forget 
 itself; and the Manichaean could repeat Augustine's noble 
 saying with a clearer right than its author: "Thou hast 
 made us, O God, for thyself, and our souls are restless 
 till they return to thee." For the great creed-maker of 
 Christendom would fain have combined with this endless 
 aspiration in the convert a moral and spiritual impotence 
 which would have made conversion impossible. He pro- 
 fessed to find in this morally impotent human nature the 
 possibility of a yearning for Christ throughout all religions 
 previous to his coming, which no rational logic could de- 
 duce from the premises. If the Church could hold to the 
 existence of a conscience in face of its own theory of total 
 depravity, surely Mani might maintain its authority in spite 
 of his theory of man's structural relation to an ante-natal 
 bondage to the Darkness. 
 
 W'c must guard against interpreting Mani as holding to 
 the unrighteousness of matter in our own broad sense of 
 that word. It is a proof of the simplistic notions of m.oral 
 evil in his day, as well as of the predominance of one form 
 of vice over others in the ancient world, that this system 
 gives such emphasis to the sin of concupiscence, as if it 
 were the only or the chief form in which the senses led 
 mankind astray. This was the sin of the first parents. 
 For Mani interpreted the Fall as of a nature which the 
 Mosaic writer himself did not understand, because he 
 wrote in the service of the Demiurge, not of the Supreme 
 Father. The tree of knowledge was a figure of Christ as 
 the true gnosis ; the prohibition to eat of it came from the 
 Prince of Darkness, who sought to keep man from the light; 
 the serpent was a divine voice which thwarted the scheme. 
 
MANICH.EISM. 471 
 
 Mani could not have failed to see that physical generation 
 was indispensable to the continuance of the race. But 
 existence in the body was in comparison with his essential 
 ideal life a lapse and loss, since the soul was really super- 
 sensuous. And in judging these now exploded theories 
 of the ancients concerning the inherent impurity of the 
 sensible world, it must be borne in mind that they did 
 not imply the repudiation of all physical relations for all 
 human beings, but the comparative imperfection of those 
 who are involved in these relations. A secular world 
 was recognized to be necessary, as well as a religious 
 world ; and since religion itself consisted in the struggle 
 to throw off these implications, there could reall\' be for 
 man no religion without them. Buddhism had its place 
 for the busy laity as well as for the absorbed saint ; nay, 
 distinguished itself more than any other ancient faith by 
 the institution of practical good-will in visible earthly 
 forms. Mani was no exception. Celibacy and ascetic re- 
 straint from property were in his system also only for 
 those who had consecrated themselves to purely spiritual 
 aims, the advanced believers, who saw and pursued the 
 highest gjiosis. It is not true that he forbade the social 
 conditions to his converts generally, or that he believed 
 society to be possible without sexual ties. It would be far 
 less unjust to suppose that Jesus, when he called men to 
 leave all and follow him, to divide their goods, and shake 
 off the dust of a world of flesh and blood that could not 
 inherit his kingdom, sought to abolish homes, trades, gov- 
 ernment, and society itself. For Jesus really seems to have 
 regarded the visible world as on the verge of destruction, 
 and the judgment day close at hand. Jesus preached a 
 practical love quite as hard to reconcile with his condem- 
 nation of the visible world, as a full acceptance of secular 
 and social interests upon lower planes would be with Mani's 
 contempt of matter as impure. Even Plato treats the love 
 
472 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 of the sexes as evil ; his ideal citizens of a republic, male 
 and female, are not allowed voluntary unions, but solely 
 under laws executed by public officials for the public 
 benefit. 
 
 It is the pride of modern thought to have rehabilitated 
 the material form in which all human experience must find 
 its expression. The boundless physical and social opporr 
 tunity, the. breadth and complexity of human relations, 
 have immeasurably increased the estimate of what the 
 senses are, and can do for man. Not even the authority 
 of the New Testament can commend the old negations to 
 the lips of modern Christians, But the old religions had 
 to take the world as it was in their day. That ideal 
 capacity which makes religions did not denounce the 
 world which we now sec; it rather asserted one quite con- 
 trary to the world which it saw, and which could neither 
 receive nor contain its own world. Its necessity was to 
 overcome this world, either by living above it in ascetic 
 separation, or by expecting its supersedure by the higher 
 life of the spirit. It struggled against the bonds of the 
 organism whence brutal possibilities seemed to flow. It 
 was because the sense-world is omnipresent that it seemed 
 to stand so obstinately in the- way of the perfection that 
 the eye never saw nor the ear heard. It was the heart 
 of Plato's creed that so long as beauty and truth were 
 seen only in their embodied forms, however high these 
 might be, the soul of beauty, by and through which they 
 were beautiful or true, was not perceived. Not the con- 
 crete body but the universal principle was divine. Yet 
 Plato could see that to one who had perception of eternal 
 archetypal ideas, the world w^ould become their divine 
 expression. Philo, again, the Platonizing Jew of Alexan- 
 dria, was looking only at the power of bodily seductions 
 to blind the soul to ideas, when he said, " Matter plots 
 against the soul, lifeless and dead as it is. For when the 
 
MANICH^ISM. 473 
 
 mind is busied on sublime contemplation, it judges the body 
 to be a hostile and evil thing; for the soul of the athlete 
 and the soul of the philosopher differ." ^ " The body," 
 says the Book of Wisdom, " weigheth down the mind that 
 museth upon many things." " There is a law in my mem- 
 bers," said Paul, " that wars against the law of my mind." 
 It was certainly natural that the devotee of ideal virtue and 
 knowledge, in ancient times, should dwell much upon the 
 distractions and perplexities woven about him by the actual 
 world, — material, social, political, institutional. " Invin- 
 cibly urged to believe in justice, and cast into a world 
 which is injustice itself, needing eternity to vindicate its 
 dealings, and sharply arrested by the chasm of death, — 
 what," says Renan, "would you have him do?" In the 
 absence of those practical resources which science has 
 developed in every human relation, the noblest emotions 
 required something more than a foothold in the super- 
 sensual world, — even an attraction to the claims and in- 
 terests of that world amounting to repulsion from all phy- 
 sical limitations. 
 
 What has most contributed to the ennobling of the 
 senses, the rehabilitation of matter in modern times, is the 
 scientific discovery that all thought is so closely related 
 to the action of the senses and the brain that the old line 
 between matter and spirit as distinct worlds is effaced, and 
 we are open to the conviction that we cannot honor any 
 form of virtue or truth without reverence for those phy- 
 sical conditions and laws by which alone it can become 
 effectual for good. Therefore it is evident that the words 
 " body " and " matter " could only have been used in the 
 older systems to cover a much narrower ground of cosmic 
 meaning than with us. And it will be found, curiously 
 enoucfh, that those who were most hostile to matter treated 
 the most important material forms with, veneration ; as the 
 
 1 Philosophical Allegory of the Sacred Laws, bk. ili. 22. 
 
474 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 Manichaeans did the sun and moon, and as the Christians 
 did the reahty of Christ's flesh and blood, the resurrection 
 of the Body, and the Millennial Kingdom with its visionary 
 mixture of physical elements with supernatural and impos- 
 sible conditions, which involved no less than the destruc- 
 tion of the world. Even the crown of Christian thought, 
 the Gospel of John, did but modify this curious discrep- 
 ancy; since it resorted to the physical world for its whole 
 symbolism of the descent of the Logos as Light into the 
 Darkness of the Flesh, wherein even " its own " could not 
 comprehend it. And even such men as Clement of Alex- 
 andria, Origen, Jerome, who were hostile to the materialism 
 of the Apocaly4)se, did not rise above this inconsistent 
 delight in sensuous images of ideal truths. With a few 
 marvellous exceptions like the poet-prophet of science 
 Lucretius, the thinkers of that earnest time believed the 
 material world to be at war with the highest aims of man ; 
 while yet every one of them employed the material world 
 as symbol, allegory, parable, or apologue, to express his 
 highest thought. These facts are sufficient to warn us 
 against giving too literal or too modern an interpretation 
 to the old Dualism of spirit and matter; so that it might 
 almost seem reasonable to substitute such other terms for 
 these as active and passive, higher and lower, living and 
 dead, perfect and imperfect. 
 
 But we should especially err, if we regard Dualism as 
 atheism. To assume the reality of an eternal, uncreated 
 principle of matter outside of God, while yet finding a 
 basis for aspiration and duty in a supreme principle of 
 good, was not to deny, so much as to affirm, God. And 
 however limited the conception of deity which was not 
 inclusive of matter, it could hardly be more so than that 
 intense monotheism of Judaism and Christianity which 
 surrounded a supreme personal Will with finite condi- 
 tions and anthropomorphic defects. 
 
MANICH.EISM. 
 
 475 
 
 The charge of immorality brought by Augustine and 
 other Church Fathers against the Manichaeans is not 
 Hkely to be admitted by any candid student who is 
 famiHar with the mode of deaHng with heretics adopted 
 by the great apologists for Christianity. The confuta- 
 tion of heresies by Irenaeus and Origcn rested upon the 
 assumption that the denial of orthodoxy inevitably led to 
 immorality. Even the doctrines of opponents were inva- 
 riably ascribed to the worst motives, and presented as 
 unfavorably as possible. It is always natural for religious 
 dogmatism to infer immoral results from the rejection 
 of opinions which the critic has come to regard as the 
 foundation of his own virtue and peace. The accusations 
 brought by Cyril and Augustine against the Manichaeans 
 were in accordance with this traditional method. They 
 were the more improbable from the fact that the hostility 
 of this sect to the material world led naturally to the sup- 
 pression of every sensual tendency. On the other hand, it is 
 possible that the Gnostic conceit of being the elect among 
 believers might lead in some instances to fanatical perver- 
 sion of the text, "to the pure all things are pure." But 
 the danger was quite as great in the similar conceit of the 
 orthodox, whose morals, if we may judge from the admo- 
 nitions and reproofs of the chief apostles, had also their 
 perverted leaven in the abuse of church membership for 
 vanity and vice. Augustine, who is the principal witness 
 in proof of the practice of horrible and obscene rites in 
 the meetings of the Manichaeans, continued to be a hearer 
 in the sect for nine years. He admits that they earnestly 
 exhorted their disciples to guard against sensuality, and 
 that he himself, loving pleasures of this kind, was not 
 willing to become anything more than a hearer, through 
 fear of binding himself to purity by their vows of member- 
 ship. Nor does he anywhere pretend that they had secret 
 rites, though he brought everything he could against them. 
 
476 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 in his letter to induce a friend to leave them for the Chris- 
 tian communion. Cyril, who makes similar charges, was 
 the most unscrupulously intolerant of Christian priests. 
 Foolish and incredible maxims were ascribed to Mani ; 
 and Augustine's preposterous charge that he imagined 
 almsgiving and other acts of humanity to be sacrifices to 
 demons, is answered by his letter to Marcellus, which be- 
 gins with praising this person for his charity.^ Almsgiving 
 seems to have been the duty of the Manichaean laity to 
 their ascetic devotees, who, like the Buddhist bonzes, 
 lived on pious gifts, after the apostolic ideal, or according 
 to the teaching of Jesus, to be without thought for the 
 morrow, like the birds of the air or the flowers of the field. 
 The vows of the elect were at least ethically creditable. 
 They were: (i) Of the mouth, — not to eat forbidden food, 
 nor utter anything untrue, unkind, or base; (2) Of the 
 hands, — to be pure from all violence or crime; (3) Of 
 the bosom, — to keep out all evil thoughts.^ Was not this 
 the old Avestan formula, — " purity of thought, word, and 
 deed "? According to Clement of Alexandria, who is not 
 friendly to them, their principal precept was self-respect.^ 
 Libanius commended them to the governor of Pales- 
 tine, as a people who mortified the flesh and regarded 
 death as a release ; who harmed none, yet were every- 
 where harassed and persecuted. They are reported by 
 some to have thought war indefensible, and music a gift 
 from Heaven. Their hymns, which were called lascivious 
 and polytheistic by their opponents, seem to have been 
 descriptive of Paradise and of divine yEons, of the mysti- 
 cal union of believers with Christ, and contained such 
 imagery of devotion as was familiar to religious feeling in 
 
 * Archelaus : Disfiuiatio cum Matute, 5. This work is of uncertain historic value, but 
 very ancient ; and at least shows what was thought of Mani at a period much earlier than 
 Augustine. 
 
 2 Beausobre : Hist, du Manichizisme, ii. 791. 
 
 ^ Stromata, ii. 20. 
 
MANICHyEISM. 477 
 
 their time.^ In turn they charged the orthodox with hav- 
 ing reinstated pagan sacrifices in their love-feasts {jigapcB)^ 
 idolatry in their service of martyrs, and the heathen cal- 
 endar in their festival-days ; and even with having re- 
 tained the morals of the heathen unchanged. As for the 
 charge of polytheism, they might have retorted that the 
 angelology of the Christians was essentially similar to their 
 own, quite as complicated a system of guardian spirits to 
 be invoked, consecrating every object in Nature or art, 
 presiding over nations and cities, a host of saints and mar- 
 tyrs lifted into thrones, and served with sacrifice and vow. 
 In truth, both systems were natural developments of the 
 old Persian mythology, — the one on Jewish, the other on 
 heathen ground. As for demonology, the dualist's belief 
 in an essential principle of evil was not more prolific of 
 Satanic powers than the Christianity of the New Testament 
 and the whole Church of the first five centuries, in which 
 the doctrine of demons ruled without an exception among 
 its greatest names. 
 
 Here is the reply of a Manichsean bishop to Augustine's 
 invective : — 
 
 " You ask if I receive the gospel. Is that a question to ask a man 
 who observes all its commands ? It is I who should ask you if you 
 receive the gospel, since you show no signs of receiving it effectually. 
 I have left father, mother, children. I have renounced all that the gos- 
 pel commands me to renounce, and you ask if I receive the gospel. 
 I see that you do not know in what the gospel consists. I have re- 
 nounced gold and silver. I am content each day with the food suffi- 
 cient for it. I am not anxious about to-morrow's clothing. You see 
 in me those beatitudes which comprehend the gospel. You see me 
 poor, meek, peaceful, of pure heart. You see me suffering persecu- 
 tion for righteousness' sake. Yet you doubt if I receive the gospel. 
 
 1 Tlie song of St. Thomas, on the marriage of the Church with Christ, has been supposed 
 to be of Manichaean origin, substituting divine for earthly nuptials, after the manner of the 
 Solomonic Canticles of the Old Testament. Other similar productions mentioned by Augustine 
 (Against Faustus) have been traced to the same source, but without certainty. See Fabricius, 
 Codex Apocryphus Novi Tesiamenti. 
 
4/8 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 You charge me with pagan idolatry. Pagans worship by temples, 
 images, altars, victims, perfumes. I do otherwise : and I have a 
 different opinion of the service agreeable to God. I myself, if I am 
 worthy of it, am the rational temple of the Divinity ; Jesus Clirist is 
 the living image of his living majesty. A wise soul is the truth, is his 
 altar. And true sacrifice is pure and simple prayer." ^ 
 
 Here is the Manichee's ethical ideal, comparing favor- 
 ably enough with the best claims of his opponents. It 
 would hardly have found its way down to us through the 
 writings of an antagonist, had it not sufficient foundation 
 in history to deserve our credence. 
 
 The two main charges against Manichaeism were Magic 
 and Gnosticism. The first associated it with Persian ori- 
 gins, the second with Egyptian and Greek. With the 
 growth of orthodoxy, and the conflicts of nascent Chris- 
 tianity with the other religions of the world, the old sym- 
 pathy for Persia, naiVely hinted in the story of the Magi 
 bringing their willing gifts to the infant Christ, became 
 transformed into dislike, and the name of Magi, standing 
 for the Dualism of the East, was chiefly known through 
 its derivative, magic, the art of controlling invisible powers 
 to forbidden ends. Mani was by origin and training a 
 Magus; but only in this fact was there any color in the 
 charge brought against him of magical practices. The 
 word magic has in fact a nobler meaning and descent. 
 The Greeks ascribed it to Zoroaster and his priests, and 
 held it in profound respect. Pliny says the Magus Ostha- 
 nes, who accompanied Xerxes, " inspired the Greeks with 
 a rage for the art of magic ; and that in the most ancient 
 times, and indeed almost invariably, men sought in it the 
 highest renown." ^ " What crime," asks Apuleius, " in 
 being a Magus (or priest) and knowing ceremonial laws 
 and rites? "^ Pythagoras, Democritus, Empedocles, and 
 
 * Fiustus {a/jtd Au£-usiinum, v. ii.) - Natural History, bk. xxx. chap. 2. 
 
 •'' Apologia, I. 
 
MANICH^ISM. 479 
 
 Plato crossed the seas to learn it, and returning home 
 expatiated upon it as " one of their grandest mysteries." ^ 
 ApoUonius Tyanaeus called Persia the land of wisdom, and 
 sought the Magi as its exponents.^ Originally the word 
 magic seems to have been used to designate religious 
 functions, independently of all secret or dangerous arts. 
 Persian Magianism meant that or something even higher. 
 Suidas says that philosophers and lovers of God are called 
 Magi among the Persians. Ammianus calls Magic the 
 purest worship of divine things. Diogenes Laertius quotes 
 authors who place the Magi as fathers of ancient philoso- 
 phy, Hindu and Jewish, and ascribes to them exalted at- 
 tainments.^ It is curious that he adduces Aristotle in 
 proof that they were ignorant of all kinds of divination by 
 magic.^ Dio Chrysostom says those whom the Persians 
 call Magi were the persons most fitted by nature for truth 
 and for religious wisdom.^ Philo Judaeus also describes 
 their love of investigation ; calls them " a numerous body 
 of virtuous and honorable men;" and adds that "whoever 
 is virtuous is free." 
 
 It is evident that in the various phases of meaning under- 
 gone by this word, we have a confession of the great indebt- 
 edness of the Greek and Roman mind to Asiatic culture, 
 and a reflection of complete changes in the sense of re- 
 lationship to it produced by religious hostilities. When 
 we contrast the respect with which the Greek writers speak 
 of the wisdom of the Magi, and the willingness of Pliny to 
 collect the results of their physical speculations and pre- 
 scriptions of occult powers in herbs and stones, with the 
 discredit ecclesiastically attached to the name of Zoroaster 
 through the Middle Ages, as prime teacher of whatever se- 
 cret mastery over natural powers had been either achieved 
 
 * Pliny: Natural History, xxx. i. 2 Ibid., xxxiv. 17. 
 
 ^ Diogenes Laertius; Lives of Philosophers, Introduction. * Ibid. 
 
 ^ Oratio Borysthenitica. 
 
480 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 or pretended to, and which was persecuted by the Church 
 cis the work of the Devil down to the time when the first 
 essays of modern free physical inquiry were crushed out, 
 so far as possible, under the name of Magic or the " Black 
 Art," — we obtain some conception of the power of special 
 religious interests to pervert the historic relations and obli- 
 gations of the race. But it is important to observe that this 
 narrowness of a special religion does not prevent the laws 
 of continuous evolution from pursuing their way across its 
 exceptional claims, in spite of every such denial of its share 
 in the delusions of the past. In this point of view the 
 relations of Christianity to what it called the Zoroastrian 
 Magic of Manichaeism are deserving of study. 
 
 There was certainly ample foundation in the demonic 
 world of the Avesta, and the incantations and sorceries to 
 which the Mazdean priests were led by their dualistic ex- 
 perience, for the general belief of the Christian world in 
 the Persian origin of magic in this inferior sense. The 
 invisible realm of powers inferior or hostile to God was, 
 however, just as real to the Christian believer in the mys- 
 tical powers of the name and cross of One who came to 
 conquer Satan and his hosts, and who had driven devils 
 out of men into swine, as it was to the Zoroastrian, who 
 met the hosts of Ahriman at every turn, and used against 
 them the holy Honover cr the staff of power. The pseudo- 
 science of controlling demons is but the u.itaught effort to 
 resist threatening forces in Nature, conceived under human 
 analogies, and requires quite other than religious influences 
 to emancipate it into positive knowledge and mastery of 
 things. It was as real to Origen as to Jamblichus or to 
 Mani, or to the Chaldean diviners of the Roman empire. 
 It was real to Jesus and his apostles, and to the whole 
 early Church. It was not any special propensity in the 
 Persian Magus to the use of occult powers to evil ends 
 that moved the hatred of the Christian Church to him; 
 
MANICH^ISM. 481 
 
 not his mere belief in demonic possession or demonic 
 function in the government of this world, — it believ^ed 
 in these as firmly as he, — but his interference with the ex- 
 clusive claim of its own God and Saviour. His rival God 
 and creed in whose interest his war against demons was 
 waged was a pretension which made his angels and demons 
 alike detestable. The only difference between the magic 
 practised by the Church and that which it held blasphe- 
 mous in the pagan or heretic was that the power which 
 both sides claimed to have acquired over the elemental 
 world, was exercised by the one through talismans, relics, 
 holy formulas, and symbols centring in the orthodox 
 Christ, and by the other through analogous instrumen- 
 talities centring in a false or heretical system. As the 
 Manichsean inherited from Mazdeism the belief that 
 everything in Nature and human life had its guardian 
 spirit and its ensnaring demon, so the Christian inherited 
 a similar conception from the Judaism which had drunk 
 deeply at Persian springs, and in the time of Christ had 
 a demonology far more minute and elaborate than the 
 Avesta itself.^ With that control over the spirits good or 
 evil in which magic consisted. Monotheism was, in fact, 
 far more in accordance than Dualism, since it brought 
 the natural and supernatural worlds into closer relation 
 through a common origin and dependence. The Sibyl- 
 line oracles, falsely ascribed to early heathen prophetesses 
 inspired to testify in the interest of the Jewish and Chris- 
 tian religions, but belonging to the centuries immediately 
 before and after Christ, abound in evidence of the strength 
 of this element in both religions. The Apocalypse of 
 John, pervaded by the magic of numbers, of satanic and 
 guardian powers, possession and exorcism, ministering 
 spirits of all kinds subject to faith, brings Christian Testa- 
 ment and Jewish Talmud to one plane. Every one of 
 
 ^ Supernatural Religion, pt. i. chap. iv. 
 31 
 
482 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 the Church Fathers accepted in substance the data of 
 magic. Those diabolic powers, which they held to be 
 in special collusion with the heathen, they never thought 
 of denying as unreal, but lifted them into their mytho- 
 logical series, associating them with the Fall of man and 
 the bad giants of the elder world. The witchcraft de- 
 lusion of the whole Church down to recent times, the me- 
 diaeval mania for transactions with Satan about the soul, 
 were but the mighty survival of that early Christianity 
 which down to the tenth century believed that a grand 
 transaction of Christ with Satan, wherein the latter was 
 tricked by the former out of his real property in the soul 
 of man, constituted the substance of the Atonement. All 
 gifts of healing and of tongues, by which sinners and 
 heathen were converted, all miraculous deliverances from 
 evil, all vows to guardian saints and angels, were so many 
 occult powers of good to control the evil ones which 
 swarmed everywhere under the direct command of the 
 Prince of Darkness, throughout the depraved world of 
 matter and mind. It is true that with the Christian or 
 Jew, one God had created both good and evil, while with 
 the Manichaean, evil was uncreated, and a principle essen- 
 tially different from good ; but this distinction, which 
 might be expected to give to Christian supernaturalism 
 a better hope of converting the powers of evil, and so 
 inspire its magic with a nobler spirit, produced no such 
 effect. The Mazdean looked for the final conversion of 
 demons ; the Manichaean, for something very like their an- 
 nihilation, leaving a barren principle of darkness only; the 
 Christian was satisfied only with their eternal misery. 
 / It must also be observed that Manichaeism in reality 
 rejected from the three religions from which it was in 
 large degree derived a considerable amount of material 
 for magic. It discarded many of the superstitions of im- 
 plicit faith. By its comparative freedom from mysticism 
 
MANICH/EISM. 483 
 
 it avoided the gulf of thaumaturgy, into which Neopla- 
 tonisni at last fell. Its substitution of reason for revelation, 
 its aim at an intellectual elevation above physical miracles, 
 its repulsion of all contact with evil, or matter, as a prin- 
 ciple eternally separate from spirit, were of themselves 
 tendencies hostile to the coarse passion for wonder-work- 
 ing so prevalent in the early Christian ages. It was on 
 these very grounds that Mani was persecuted by the great 
 religions out of which he had gathered so much for his 
 own. He became the victim of Sassanide intolerance be- 
 cause he denied that typical form of magic on which 
 Zoroastrian rites were founded, — the resurrection of the 
 body ; and his followers were everywhere hunted down 
 by the Christians, because they would not believe the 
 Supreme God to have been born of a virgin and im- 
 prisoned in a body of real flesh and blood. Yet because 
 he could not fully emancipate himself from the Christian 
 tradition and creed, he sought to reconcile them with his 
 loftier conception of the Infinite by the only possible 
 theory, that of Docetism ; and Docetism — the theory that 
 a spiritual essence could take a purely illusory bodily 
 shape, and deceive the eyes of men by phantom images 
 of a great life and death — was to accept the doctrine of 
 magic in one form at least, and that the completest. 
 
 Notwithstanding this common ground of Christian and 
 Heathen in the conception of angelic and demonic powers, 
 the earliest recorded hate of the apostles of Christ was 
 directed against the great representative of thaumaturgy 
 in their vicinity, — Simon of Gitton, otherwise called "Si- 
 mon Magus." His pretences to exercise magical powers 
 over Nature apart from the name and following of Jesus 
 so stirred the Christian imagination of the first four cen- 
 turies that he became a gigantic nebulosity of legend. 
 He was a master of magic powers,^ the favorite of de- 
 
 1 See especially the Clementine Recognitions, ii. 9. 
 
484 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 mons, and instigated by them to proclaim himself a god. 
 He succeeded in causing himself to be " worshipped as 
 the first god," and " in persuading men that he should 
 never die." ^ He caused himself to be buried alive, in ex- 
 pectation that he would rise on the third day.^ He was 
 the founder and father of all the great heretical schools 
 which went under the name of Gnostics.^ He was the 
 teacher of every kind of vice. He was the pest of man- 
 kind, and his godhood was dethroned by Peter at Rome.* 
 The doctrines of this theological monster, if we may form 
 a judgment from the confused exposition of his " gospel " 
 by Irenaius and Hippolytus, neither of whom seems to have 
 had either the disposition or the power to unfold its mean- 
 ing, contained nothing to justify all this denunciation. It 
 must have been an evolution of psychological attributes 
 from the idea of God conceived as the immutable, eternal, 
 yet forever self-projecting reality;^ and this dramatically 
 and allegorically presented as a descending series, ending 
 in the latest revelation, through himself, for making the 
 universe one in God and emancipating the human soul from 
 material bonds. He was eclectic, and held heathen teach- 
 ing to be sufficient without Christ, if rightly understood.*^ 
 Of any dualistic theor}^ or special demonic system, even 
 his enemies seem to have brought no charge ; but every 
 feature of later Gnosticism, Dcmiurgism, and Docetism 
 especially, was seen reflected in its germs in the Samaritan 
 Antichrist, whose chief sins seem to have been, " inter- 
 preting the books of Moses as he pleased,"' and usurping 
 the place of Jesus as image of God.^ The sin of Simon is 
 
 1 This charge of claiming to be God is elaborated in the pseudo Clemoitine Recognitions, 
 a romance of the tiiird century, bk. ii. Justin Martyr: Apology, i. 26, 56. Origen : Phi- 
 losopJtv, vi. I. 
 
 ' Hippolytus : Philosophy, vi. i. 
 
 ^ Irenasus : Against Heresies, bk. i. Eusebius : Hist. Eccl., ii. 13. 
 
 * Eusebius, ii 13, 14. ° Hippolytus: Philosophy, vi. 1, 17. 
 
 * Matter : Histoire critique du Gnosticisine, ii. iii. 
 
 T Hippolytus : Philosophy, vi. v. 19. 8 Irensus, i. 23. 
 
MANICH^ISM. 485 
 
 not apparent to critical study. To the eyes of Paul and 
 Peter, according to the Book of Acts, it consisted in con- 
 ceiving the power of Christ as working miracles through 
 them for mercenary motives ; and in mistaking their gift of 
 healing for a magic secret which he wanted to buy. But 
 the story refutes itself Simon could have seen no miracle 
 wrought by the apostles ; and if he saw anything which they 
 claimed to be miraculous, it could only have been some- 
 thing akin to magical illusion, and involves them in the 
 very delusion they would fasten upon him. His doctrine 
 of a fallen ^on whom his ministry was to restore to the 
 Pleroma of God, and in her the world, led to the story of his 
 leading about a reformed prostitute, — according to some, 
 far from reformed, — whom he styled " the lost sheep; " ^ 
 and still further, to charges of licentiousness against his 
 whole school.2 Yet it was conceded that Simon had re- 
 deemed this Helena from slavery.^ To take her with him 
 as a type of that divine power which he wished to deliver 
 in every soul, might be the act of a lunatic in our days, 
 but certainly no more implied improper relations than did 
 similar typical actions recorded of the Hebrew prophets ; 
 and her presence might have served to emphasize his 
 doctrine and to illustrate its practical power over conduct. 
 If, as the Fathers assert, it was his purpose to counterfeit 
 or rival Jesus, he could point to a prototype, beyond all 
 suspicion of guilt, in the female friend out of whom the 
 Messiah had cast seven devils, and who loved to sit at 
 his feet. Nor was any type of sin and recovery more 
 frequently employed in those days than the sexual one. 
 It was an " adulterous and sinful generation," which the 
 Messiah was to redeem. 
 
 Whether Simon's thaumaturgic gifts were exercised, if 
 he possessed them, in the interest of his own claims to be 
 
 * Hippolytus : Philosofihy^ vi. i, 19. Irenaeus, i. 23. Matthew, xviii. 12. 
 
 ' Hippolytus: Philosophy, vi. i, 19. ^ Irenxus, i. 23, 
 
486 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 the Paraclete or Advocate, or in some other way the power 
 of God, may be difficult to determine. But the evidence 
 of his imposture comes entirely from his enemies ; and 
 there seems to be no more reason for crediting it than 
 for regarding the whole great Gnostic movement of the 
 first four centuries as imposture, as the same writers would 
 have us believe that it was. Whatever motives his reli- 
 gious claim may have supplied, they were not necessarily 
 selfish ones, any more than those which arc represented 
 as actuating the apostles of the Book of Acts. Their 
 magic w^as of a character similar to his, — it was a means 
 of proving supernatural gifts as the prerogative of believers 
 in Christ. But the magic of the Gnostics generally, and 
 of Mani in particular, was a part of their psychological 
 symbolism ; it ascribed to certain elements in Nature con- 
 stant virtues and vices as inherent in their being, according 
 to that essential Dualism which was the law of the universe. 
 It was therefore of the nature of science as much as of 
 superstition ; or rather it was incipient science in the 
 leading-strings of superstition. 
 
 In this point of view it was the precursor of that 
 •' magic " which enclosed the germs of modern science 
 during the Middle Ages, — that original study of physical 
 Nature which was persecuted by the Church because it 
 foreshadowed some other solution of the problems of life, 
 some other salvation for the mind of man, than the Chris- 
 tian Trinity and Atonement. It is true that in common 
 with the Church, Manichaism had rejected the material 
 world ; not, however, as under the curse of God, but as pro- 
 ceeding from a principle antagonistic to God. But it had 
 at least subordinated arbitrary will to positive principles 
 and laws, and sought to test the books and traditions of 
 religious belief by them, in the name of reason. And it 
 was in a similar though more consistent spirit that the 
 fathers of modern science faced the curse that " revealed 
 
MANICH.'EISM. 487 
 
 religion " laid upon Nature, and with earnest faith in free- 
 dom and in law strove to rehabilitate man's dwelling-place, 
 as the Manicha^ans had sought to deanthropomorphize 
 God. This was the forbidden magic with which they con- 
 fronted the magic, or miracle, of papal consecrations and 
 holy signs and talismans, which for centuries gathered 
 about the pious trust and daily life of men. As the Gnos- 
 tic traced his hierarchy of psychological yEons from the 
 highest spirit down to the lowest emanation, and made re- 
 ligion consist in the restoration of their unity in God, so 
 these new Gnostics of Nature carried the purpose a step 
 farther, and strove to bring about the unity of the physi- 
 cal and spiritual cosmos, as the Gnostic had done with the 
 spiritual alone. Astrology and alchemy — the magic, not 
 of stars and metals only, but of all elements — were inspired 
 by the idea that all things are in natural sympathetic rela- 
 tion, — from the atom to the perfect soul ; that lines of 
 dynamic influence are traceable through correspondent 
 forms, and that the power to bring forth ideal fruits from 
 these hitherto unexplored relations was to be secured by 
 the right knowledge of their inherent laws and unselfish 
 obedience to their commands. Ignorant as children, they 
 took fanciful resemblances for real relations ; but they an- 
 ticipated many scientific truths, and were led by that first 
 condition of science, — the instinct of the permanent and 
 universal. The instant this trust in Nature as the great 
 teacher appeared, it was treated by the Church as an alien 
 and rival authority; and for this reason, — the Church rested 
 upon exclusive Will ; science rested upon positive natural 
 law. The supernatural magic of the Church aimed at 
 the destruction of the natural magic of the scientist, as it 
 had a thousand years before at the natural magic of the 
 heretic and heathen, who put their thaumaturgy against 
 its miracles ; and so the birthday of our liberty saw the 
 martyrdom of its prophets as masters of the " Black 
 
488 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 Art." But persecuted *' magic " has evolved modern 
 science, and science has in turn exorcised the Church. 
 It is noticeable, therefore, that in this hated name of 
 magic, preserving the memory of Zoroaster and his priest- 
 hood, has descended a flame of freedom which the Aryan 
 kindled, three thousand years ago, on the heights of Iran, 
 for his struggle against the powers of darkness in the name 
 of Ahura, the self-created light. The word acquired a 
 nobler meaning with time. The darkness which the me- 
 diaeval Magus had to master was ignorance, ecclesiasti- 
 cism, a theology of arbitrary will and slavish fear. The 
 Dualism of the Persian is lost in a strife of powers deeper 
 than that which divided Ormuzd from Ahriman, or the 
 believer in two hostile principles from the believer in one 
 All-creating God. 
 
 A modern writer,^ using the word in its supernatural 
 sense, regards magic as a result of Dualism. If he is right, 
 it cannot be that the Dualism from which magic results is 
 a belief in two gods instead of one ; but rather some such 
 recognition of the power of evil in life and the world as be- 
 longed to Christian monotheism in common with what is 
 commonly supposed to have been Dualism proper,— the 
 religion of the Avesta. Christianity, in its conception of 
 evil, simply put God and Lucifer for Ahura and Ahriman. 
 But it did not merely inherit that conception from Persia, 
 — it seized and developed it. The implication of Ahriman 
 in creation was more than equalled by the master-stroke 
 of Satan in effecting the full surrender of mankind through 
 Adam's fall to a metaphysical hatred of good far beyond 
 the simple ethical conceptions of the Avesta. This mono- 
 theistic Dualism extended the sovereignty of evil into eter- 
 nal relations, making hell a positive permanent fact, which 
 the Avesta did not do. The New Testament really gives 
 more scope to the Prince of Darkness than the Bundehesh. 
 
 ' Rydberg : Magic of Middle Ages. 
 
MANICILEISM. 489 
 
 The Church of One God was more dualistic than the 
 doctrine of Two Principles. It beheved in the existence 
 of the " father of hes and the founder of oracles " as ab- 
 solutely as in that of the P'ather of Jesus. Early Chris- 
 tianity regarded the whole heathen world as diabolic. 
 Catholics added all heretics to the category, and the fe- 
 male sex in special, burning millions at the stake for sor- 
 cery. The Reformers added all past Catholicism to the 
 list; and Luther, who had the sharpest eyes for devils of 
 any man in his day, held the Church, as an institution, to 
 have been an invention of Satan. So that a monotheistic 
 religion has actually made the whole history of man a 
 diabolic drama,^ which the Incarnation alone illumines 
 with its Divine interference. Scarcely a voice was raised 
 in orthodox Christendom for centuries against those horri- 
 ble practical deductions from the dogma of depravity and 
 the power of Satan over Nature and man which were bath- 
 ing all Europe in innocent blood. It cannot be pretended 
 that Dualism proper, according to the common meaning 
 of that term, is more guilty than monotheism of the bar- 
 barous forms of belief in magic as the instrument of evil. 
 Nothing could more clearly show that man's treatment of 
 the problem of moral evil is independent of the lines which 
 separate positive religions, than to compare the supersti- 
 tious precepts and customs prevailing in mediaeval Chris- 
 tianity on this subject, — the omens and precautions and 
 anathemas relating to witchcraft and sorcery, with those 
 of a similar nature in the Avesta. It would be found that 
 the former list largely outnumbers the latter, and reaches 
 through the details of life with at least equal thorough- 
 ness.^ The popular notion that heathenism is responsible 
 for Christian magic is therefore an error. 
 
 The Christian sense of the power of evil, like the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of eternal punishment, was in fact the recoil 
 
 1 Rydberg: Magic of Middle Ages, p. 19S. ' Ibid., 210, 211. 
 
490 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 of man's conscience from nature in himself and the world, 
 which in Christianity took the form of self-contempt and 
 self-rejection, which turned the back upon the whole past 
 of human progress, and laid the whole burden of human 
 misery on the constitution of Nature and the soul ; whose 
 great interpreter for ages has been that strange compend 
 of the savage and the saint, that child of African passion 
 and Roman legalism, — Augustine. 
 
 The historical dev^elopmcnt of Dualism under the mono- 
 theistic system of Christianity Reserves closer treatment. 
 Under this system, evil is either directly the result of God's 
 will, — that is. He is alike the creator of good and evil; or 
 else indirectly, — that is, through the free will which he has 
 bestowed on man, with full knowledge of the consequences 
 of the gift. The former of these solutions was derived 
 from Judaism, which had imbibed from Mazdeism in the 
 Captivity the distinct personality of an adversary, — Satan, 
 as the inciter to wickedness, appearing for the first time in 
 the post-exilian Book of Chronicles.^ The growth of Jew- 
 ish demonology was extremely rapid ; and its fallen angels, 
 its swarming devils, its hierarchy of evil powers, pervading 
 the worship of Jahvch, went over bodily into Christianity, 
 which was really but a reform in the bosom of Judaism, 
 working over its higher and lower elements in the in- 
 terest of indivdduahty and ethical purity. It ascribed to 
 Satan, the roaring lion, the father of lies, all diseases of 
 mind and body, all heathen dogmas, rites, and conduct. 
 If, as many modern Christians suppose, Jesus did not 
 believe in such a personal enemy to God and good, why 
 the repeated allusion to him, in the Temptation, and in the 
 expulsion of demons, while Jesus is nowhere presented as 
 rebuking the almost universal belief of his countrymen in 
 such a power? What idea Jesus had of his origin or of 
 the extent of his power nowhere appears, except that he 
 
 1 I Chronicles, xxi. Compare 2 Kings, xxiv. 
 
MANICH^ISM. 491 
 
 believed him subject to the power of God, and through 
 God to his own. But Paul distinctly adheres to the old 
 Jewish idea that Jahveh is the creator of evil in man, as 
 the potter moulds his clay.^ The Christian Fathers had 
 the harder task of reconciling their Christian monotheism 
 with the existence of this inconvertible evil Will, whose 
 power over man was due to a corresponding tendency in 
 the will of man. In Satan and in man evil was traceable, 
 not to the will of God, but to disobedience and revolt in 
 their own wills; as, however, they were created and endowed 
 by the omniscience of God, evil was indirectly his work. 
 Lactantius in the fourth century, in fact, speaks of God as 
 creating two spirits, — one that should hold to good, and 
 one that should fall and become evil ; ^ showing that Chris- 
 tian monotheism moved in the same track with Persian 
 Dualism. And this was the primitive doctrine which went 
 on demonizing the creed and conduct of the Middle Ages, 
 overturning all reason by the internecine conflict of God 
 and the Devil. Hermogenes, a Christian Father in the 
 second century, who anticipated Mani, making matter 
 eternal and the source of evil, Justin Martyr, Clement of 
 Alexandria, and Origen, who did the same, still threw evil 
 back on God, as creator of matter from eternity. 
 
 Out of that primitive doctrine which connected evil in- 
 directly with God as conscious creator of the will and its 
 results, came the Christian article of original sin and its 
 expiation. The attempt to escape the revolting conse- 
 quences of this belief, the monstrosity of ascribing sin 
 deserving infinite wrath to the purest as well as to the 
 worst of mankind, led to Origen's kindly semi-Platonic 
 theory of antenatal sin, — a weak shifting back of the 
 tragedy of Adam's fall, without accounting for it. But 
 the old logical necessity of throwing the whole responsi- 
 
 1 Romans, ix. 17. 
 
 2 histitutiones Divinos, ii. 8. Hauteville : Morale ct VE^lise, p. 22. 
 
492 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 bility for evil on Him who made man free to choose it, 
 was not to be escaped in this way. Equally vain was the 
 theory that Adam and Eve were created pure; for how 
 could that be, if they had received a capacity for sin which 
 made them able to involve all their posterity in total de- 
 pravity and eternal wrath, and to curse the world with 
 physical death and moral impotence, so that the incarna- 
 tion of God, the atonement, and redemption through 
 Christ became necessary? How could the very first act 
 of pure beings involve such immeasurable crime and con- 
 sequence as Augustine saw in that earliest exercise of free 
 will? No such prodigy was wrought out of the first dis- 
 obedience, in the Bundehcsh ; none out of the fall of 
 Yima, in the Avesta. This was the terrible triumph of 
 Evil in a more intensely monotheistic faith. 
 
 This monstrous deduction was slowly evolved. Neither 
 the Gospels nor Paul reached it.^ The older Fathers gen- 
 erally admit the counteracting power of frec-M-ill to save, 
 as it had wounded, man, — some, like Mani, laying sin 
 at the door of eternal matter as " the flesh." It was in 
 the fifth century that the consequences of the theory 
 burst into full flower in Augustine, whose protest against 
 Pelagius argued logically that the denial of an utter per- 
 version and ruin of the will through Adam's sin struck at 
 the foundations of the Christian system by taking away 
 the necessity for atonement and salvation by Christ. 
 Nothing could serve the purpose but the conjunction of 
 absolute impotence of man for good, and eternal wrath 
 against him for doing evil, as results of the free-will which 
 God himself had given him. What premise of human 
 thought has ever brought such monstrous results from 
 the act of an omnipotent W'ill, bestowing on its children 
 the power of free choice involved in its own being? 
 
 Yet this is the natural result of the theory which traces 
 
 1 Romans, v. 12, is mistranslated. Hauteville, p. 33. 
 
MANICHiEISM. 
 
 493 
 
 evil to a personal will. Such a theory cannot solve the 
 problem. Epicurus stated the case fairly when he said: 
 
 " Either God wishes to abohsh evil and cannot, and then He is not 
 
 omnipotent ; 
 Or He cannot and does not wish to, and then He is both imperfect 
 
 and wiclved ; 
 Or He can and does not wish to, and then He is wicked ; 
 Or He both wishes to and can, and if so, How comes evil to exist 
 
 at all?" 
 
 That which is worshipped as infinite in its perfection 
 must also be infinite in its perversion; and the tracing of 
 evil to so pervertible a thing as will in God or man must 
 issue in some such exaggerated conclusion as the orthodox 
 dogma above stated. In the same way, man's free-will 
 being made responsible for evil, the issue will be an abso- 
 lute denial of all human responsibility whatever. And 
 this step is taken in the Augustinian doctrine of divine 
 " Decrees from all Eternity." It comes to this, and this 
 only : at the beginning, as at the end, God alone is respon- 
 sible for sin. One infinite personal Will in the universe 
 excludes all other responsibility for the results. 
 
 It would have been better to remember Bion's saying, 
 " that God's punishing the children for the sin of their 
 fathers is like a physician giving medicine to the son or 
 grandson of his patient." ^ It were wiser, surely, not to 
 exalt a personal Will to the throne of the universe, if the 
 conditions are that it shall behave irrationally in propa- 
 gating its own freedom. 
 
 Men have reached a solution of evil which is not com- 
 plicated by theological difficulties like these, by confining 
 themselves to the facts of human consciousness ; a solu- 
 tion which rests on natural and necessary relations, the only 
 real rest for the spirit of man, — not on the contingencies 
 of will. The Stoic Chrysippus said, that in the nature of 
 
 1 Plutarch : De Sera. Numinis Vindicta, xix. 
 
494 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 things evil is necessary to good ; that the knowledge of 
 good involves the knowledge of its opposite ; and Euripi- 
 des has the same idea. That evil is good in the making 
 is the foundation of the great consolations of the ancient 
 teachers, and stands by virtue of that conduct which of itself 
 makes good the law. The thinker sees that evil must exist, 
 if only as imperfection, as the condition of progress, as 
 the correlative of that finitencss which is the ground of all 
 individual being. The war against evil, moral and physical, 
 is the education of all greatness and all goodness ; and 
 power is measured by resistance. Evil is the contrast of 
 the actual stage on which we stand, with the ideal; whicii 
 represents a ceaseless advancing power in man to be- 
 come at one with the universe and its divine order. Only 
 this abiding hope of the ideal as the goal can make en- 
 durance of the steps possible. The dark side of Nature 
 and life cannot be justified as we justify the works or ways 
 of personal will. No conscious moral foresight or choice 
 can be rationally conceived as devising or intending the 
 wrong and suffering which have befallen the innumerable 
 millions of mankind. No anthropomorphic deity can stand 
 under the burden of such responsibility. The Platonic 
 Demiurge, commissioned to organize and shape the neces- 
 sities of crude substance into a perfect cosmos of souls and 
 bodies, working it all out teleologically, a pure system of 
 final causes, is a confessed failure, and Plato does not 
 allow his responsibility for the evil of the world. The 
 whole theology of a fore-and-after-Iooking, predetermin- 
 ing God, a time-conditioned demiurgic will, breaks down 
 before the problem of evil which attends every step of 
 human and even cosmic growth. The Life of the Uni- 
 verse, the unity of substance, to which alone belongs the 
 highest Name, is wholly incommensurate with the neces- 
 sary moulds of finite consciousness, the limited phenome- 
 nal relations of time and space. Whatever mythological 
 
MANICH^ISM. 495 
 
 forms of speech may be unavoidable in religion, the per- 
 plexities which beset this fact of evil, especially in its moral 
 aspect, will only be multiplied with the advance of knowl- 
 edge, so long as we attempt to explain it by a divine power 
 acting by intention, motive, purpose, after the manner of 
 men. No wiser are we, with all our religious systems, than 
 that oldest of true philosophers, Xenophanes, who taught 
 the Greeks that truth lay beyond their mythic tales of the 
 gods, and sought to hint what none can yet express : " God 
 is not like to mortals, in body or mind, since with the 
 whole of him he sees, with the whole of him he thinks, 
 with the whole of him he hears, forever abiding the same." 
 Till we can comprehend essential Being, eternal Substance, 
 let us not impose upon it the conditions of human will. 
 The highest philosophy is to know the laws of our being 
 in themselves ; the highest religion is to trust them as the 
 best, because they are our nature; the highest morality is 
 to work loyally upon the facts of life, transforming them 
 into the liberty and humanity of the ideal ; and where we 
 cannot do this, to accept our limits without losing our 
 faith and hope in the best. There is great help towards 
 this achievement in recognizing those limits in ourselves 
 which we refrain from ascribing to God as the substance 
 of the whole. As seeing growth but in fragments ; as 
 knowing the world not as it is in itself, but under the con- 
 ditions of our actual stage of progress ; as making the world 
 what it is to us, by ever transforming it anew into the like- 
 ness of ourselves, — we may well apply to evil the deeper 
 insight of the optimist, which perceives It to be illusion ; 
 not in so far as our duty or our emotions are concerned, 
 but in so far as it seems to contradict the promise of the 
 ideal, by covering past, present, and future alike in un- 
 changeable gloom. We have seen that this was the endur- 
 ing truth in the old Hindu conception of Maya and in the 
 Buddhist doctrine of life. Some of the Christian Fathers 
 
496 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 (even Augustine), in the same spirit, spoke of evil as un- 
 reality, as something imagined by man through his ignor- 
 ance and immaturity, and passing away in proportion as 
 he comes nearer to seeing things as a whole. Combining 
 this, as they did, with a theological anthropomorphism 
 which as Christians they could not escape, they betrayed 
 at least a desire to save the will of God from responsi- 
 bility for evil; which they could only do by denying its 
 reality. 
 
 To believe in the unreality of evil seems to require a 
 certain mystic elevation of faith ; but it is not, as we have 
 seen, without foundation in the facts of experience and the 
 laws of growth. This is indubitable. Our conception of 
 evil changes with our changing mood, our growing insight, 
 our mastery of the laws of life. It changes as we look 
 back on the things that looked so rigid in ugliness, and 
 see what it has brought about, what necessitated it, what 
 compensated it. The charitable judgment that grows with 
 our experience is found to be not charity so much as truer 
 justice; the sympathies, taught by science to enter more 
 objectively into the pain of past conditions of the world 
 or the race, learn the law that ills are relative ; that, sub- 
 stantially, the strength is according to the day. How the 
 old severities of judgment, the old sense of curse and 
 blight, melt away with the better knowledge, the freer 
 study of the world, into trust 
 
 " that somehow good 
 Will be the final goal of ill. 
 To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
 Defects of doubt and taints of blood ; 
 
 "That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete." 
 
MANICH^ISM. 497 
 
 Science helps to change the old rigid conception of 
 positive evil by proving the law of antagonism to be a 
 necessity of existence and growth. So that evil, seen in 
 its broader relations, becomes a part of that polarity which 
 runs through all life, organic or inorganic, and results in 
 structure, progress, beauty, order, good. Science is uni- 
 tary ; yet here is Dualism as its central law. And while 
 the conception of evil is thus removed from the region 
 of theological intention into that of constructive law, the 
 moral sense is made all the freer to repudiate evil choice 
 by escaping the influence of a creed which gives to moral 
 and physical evil alike the sanction of a deliberate purpose 
 of Divine Will. For the necessity of evil in some form 
 to all progress does not make it attractive, though it may 
 render the moral judgments of good men more charitable 
 to the evil-doer. But the recognition that moral evil in 
 itself is the ever-existing opposite pole to good, and that 
 progress consists in constant strife to overcome it by the 
 force of good, is the very pith of principle, the ground of 
 moral conviction and practical consecration to duty. 
 
 It is true that the elements of this polarity, the strife for 
 survival, the struggle for existence, the sacrifice of the in- 
 nocent for the guilty, the impermanence of ties, may be 
 interpreted in the interest of pessimism. And especially 
 does science tend that way when it is concerned only with 
 the understanding of phenomena, and exalts the senses as 
 sole origin of knowledge, under the name of experience, 
 ignoring the ideal and even the personal factor, without 
 which it cannot really take a step in the discovery of uni- 
 versal order. So limited is the understanding, so essential 
 is ideal insight and faith, that science is demoralized by 
 such conditions, and becomes a sterner tyrant than the- 
 ology has ever been, holding man fast to the lower aspects, 
 the discouraging concrete details, the power of outward 
 circumstances over man's hope and faith. There arises, 
 
 32 
 
498 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 even on these new fields of physical science, an incon- 
 sistency not unlike that of those early Christian sects, both 
 orthodox and heretical, who declared matter impure and 
 evil, while raising it to a rank in the universe which con- 
 ditioned and largely determined the activity of God. But 
 the true function of science is altogether different. It 
 substitutes universal law for supernatural interference and 
 caprice. It fearlessly explores the real conditions of life, 
 the facts of human destiny, and reconciles man to his re- 
 lations in the order of the world ; so educating him to 
 accept these inevitable conditions of existence, whether 
 seemingly good or evil, as the best for him, because they 
 lift him into the higher morality of free obedience and the 
 serener life of natural trust. 
 
 It has been well said that the old Greek drama aims at 
 depicting the destinies of men, and the modern at evolving 
 their characters : such is the difference in the treatment 
 of ethical and spiritual problems. The only solution of 
 evil must be found in the facts of experience themselves. 
 The inevitable laws of antagonism, of contradiction, of 
 irony, of wrong conditions, and bad uses of pain and loss, 
 must be accepted through an absolute trust in the integrity 
 of the moral universe, and solved by disinterested labor, 
 not for personal happiness, not for utilitarian successes, 
 but to fulfil the inward prompting to serve the ideal, the 
 purest, and the best. 
 
II. 
 
 GNOSTICISM. 
 
GNOSTICISM. 
 
 IT was the connection of ManicIiEism with the great 
 Gnostic schools that rendered it so obnoxious to the 
 Christian Church. It was built on the foundations laid by 
 that line of heretical teachers of the second century, — 
 Carpocrates, Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion, Bardesanes, — 
 who had gathered the spiritual and intellectual idealism 
 of the older religions into rationalistic systems, destructive 
 of implicit faith. The large scope of Gnosticism, in its 
 effort to save the traditions of human reason from being 
 swept away by an exclusive revelation, may be seen in the 
 fact that its elements have been traced in such reactions 
 against the Old Testament law and faith as the Essenic 
 rejection of the Temple service, the Septuagint conver- 
 sion of Jahveh into a more spiritual God, the Apocryphal 
 Book of Wisdom, and the Logos of Philo ; in the Platonic 
 Ideas and Emanations ; in the Dualism of Zoroaster and 
 Empedocles ; in the Buddhist doctrine of Illusion, of the 
 soul's imprisonment in the senses, and its release there- 
 from ; as well as in its non-Christian conception of a re- 
 deeming Christ. It has been supposed that Marcion, one 
 of the more learned "Gnostics, synthesized the three great 
 religions in the three principal factors of his system ; find- 
 ing his God in Christianity, his Demiurge in Judaism, his 
 Evil Principle in Heathenism. ^ It is entirely true that 
 Gnosticism was the product of an effort to combine the 
 best elements of all these religious and philosophical be- 
 liefs under a single principle, of which the appropriate 
 
 ^ Baur: Gnosis, p. zyy. 
 
502 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 name was Gnosis, or ideal knowledge. It is not meant by 
 this explanation that there was nothing original in the 
 thought or method of these men who built with the tradi- 
 tions of the world ; that their work was a conscious syn- 
 cretism only. In the mighty ferment of that age the whole 
 past was seething, and its elementary forces, loosed from 
 special combinations, had entered into the unconscious 
 circulations of mind. The new systems that were shaped 
 out of these materials were the natural products of the 
 time, which called forth its own prophets ; and they must 
 clothe in these symbols their sense of its demands. These 
 efforts of the speculative intellect to solve the mystery of 
 moral and physical evil, and bridge the passage from the 
 infinite to the finite, from the perfect to the imperfect, from 
 the highest to the lowest, without detriment to the truth of 
 either term, were therefore not mere scholastic pedantry. 
 The reproductions of the old conceptions and methods, 
 which we can now trace in so many systems that preceded 
 them, were fresh obedience to the eternal laws of thought. 
 They serve to show the sincerity and depth of those earlier 
 endeavors, and point us to those elements in them which 
 could not die with their makers. The very name by 
 which they designated their common aspiration for the 
 deeper meaning, the ideal solution of life, — gnosis, — was 
 anticipated ages before, in thajnajia of the Hindu philoso- 
 phers, chosen for a precisely similar purpose ; and it still 
 stands in our word agnosticism, to prove by implication at 
 least, even now at the end of the Christian centuries, the 
 immortality of that very aspiration which is thus declared 
 to be a fruitless dream. So far was Gnosticism from being 
 a servile adherence to ancient names and dogmas, a mere 
 eclectic farrago of accepted traditions, that by its very 
 nature, as well as by the variety and freedom of its forms, 
 it was an organic protest against implicit faith, — a recur- 
 rence to the rights of reason, when they were threatened, 
 
GNOSTICISM. 503 
 
 as never before or since in history, with entire suppression, 
 by the claims of a special revelation. Itself not free from 
 supernaturalistic elements, it resisted that passive recep- 
 tion of dogmatic and personal absolutism which is the 
 essence of supernaturalistic faith. It refused to drop the 
 constructive powers of the intellect, which twenty centuries 
 had slowly evolved, before a creed which pronounced the 
 intellect sinful and vain ; to surrender its rights of criticism 
 before old and new scriptures which bore on their face cor- 
 ruption and delusion amidst all the better features which 
 these had obscured. If the Christian Church could main- 
 tain that the masses of mankind required an incarnate 
 God, Gnosticism also could insist that the present and 
 future alike demanded that reason should not be de- 
 throned by putting a historic personage, a man of flesh 
 and blood, on the throne of the universe. No exclusive 
 religion should reign by the denial of all that other reli- 
 gions had contributed to human thought. Especially a 
 Hebrew deity, fettered in mind, ignoble in spirit, sup- 
 planted by the progress of man, could be only a Demi- 
 urge, a blind instrument of the God who is all in all. 
 Egypt, Syria, Persia, India, Greece, had not toiled merely 
 to prepare the way for a word of God that should come 
 down all new from heaven to silence them forever, and 
 begin man's life and hope afresh as if they had never 
 been. And the progress of humanity, which drops no 
 thread in the web of history, and perpetuates all forces 
 through all changes of name, to live in the great currents 
 of social evolution, whose marvellous analysis reveals that 
 no past service of thought or good has ever died, pro- 
 nounces the Gnostic right, — in that claim for universal 
 history at least. 
 
 Gnosticism accepted the name of Christian, and many 
 of the terms by which Christians expressed their faith ; 
 but the distinctive substance of that faith it rejected, as 
 
504 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 these pages have already shown. The Elkesaites^ re- 
 garded the New Testament Christ as but one of many 
 forms of the Christ who had appeared again and again in 
 human history, transformed from body to body, after the 
 manner of the Hindu incarnations of Vishnu the Pre- 
 server. The Carpocratians beHeved that the soul of Jesus 
 was like all other souls, reaching its power over the world 
 by overcoming the " world-archons," and that all who 
 were similarly victorious over evil would have similar gifts; 
 and so they put him among the great men of history, and 
 honored all alike.^ " Valentinus," says Clement of Alex- 
 andria, "makes the truth common, whether it be the Jewish 
 writings or those of the philosophers." ^ Clement, by 
 whose waitings mainly it is that we discover the nobler 
 side of the Gnostics,'* quotes Valentinus as saying that it 
 is only by the presence of God that the heart becomes 
 pure from evil, and that he who possesses a pure heart 
 shall see God.^ Marcion affirmed that the New Testament 
 Christ was not the Christ predicted in the Old Testament, 
 who was yet to come and restore the Jewish State.** It 
 was clearly recognized by the Church that revelation 
 could not endure the rivalry of reason; the question was 
 no incidental and temporary one, but rooted in the ele- 
 ments of progress ; and this war, waged by typical posi- 
 tive religion, has no cessation, scarcely a truce. As it be- 
 gan in the struggle with Gnosticism, so it has lasted to the 
 present day, and is now a struggle with science. But was 
 the Gnostic altogether in the right? By no means. 
 
 What the Christians could not understand, so exacting 
 was their own worship of Christ as a revealer of positive 
 
 1 Hippolytus : Philosophy, x. xx. 2 Irenaeus, vii. 20. 
 
 5 Clement of Alexandria : Stronicita, vi. 6. 
 
 ^ Baur (Gnosis, 520) allows this, though admitting that Clement believed that the Gnostics 
 thought all heathen truth stolen from Christianity, which was not true of the Gnostics, only 
 of Clement himself. 
 
 s Clement of Alexandria : S/romata, ii. 20. 
 
 ^ Tertullian : Against Marcion, iv. vi. 
 
GNOSTICISM. 505 
 
 divine commands, was this, — that the Gnostic was con- 
 structing a mythology around the idea of God, just as they 
 were themseh^es constructing a mythology around the name 
 ot Christ; that he was seeking to explain the fact of evil 
 by a crude philosophy of matter, just as they were by a 
 crude theory of Satanic will ; and just as they were search- 
 ing for allegories and types of Christ in the Biblical rec- 
 ords, and to a certain extent in the testimonies of heathen 
 blindness, so the Gnostic was searching out fanciful alle- 
 gories and types of a divine personal process in the whole 
 material of human experience, past and present. The one 
 structure was a work of the imagination as well as the 
 other. That of the Christians possessed the advantage 
 of a simplicity, concentration, and exclusiveness which 
 made its appeal effective with the multitudes who were 
 seeking rest from the confusion of systems and the press- 
 ing sense of ignorance and isolation. None the less real, 
 however, was that want of the age, and of all ages, which 
 was to be met only by students of the intellectual bearings 
 of spiritual truths, — by those who could not silence the 
 deep problems of experience by the magic of a miracle, 
 or the rebuke of a revelation, or by anything short of 
 the witness of the laws of thought. In the great cosmic 
 drama, or epos, of Gnosticism, spiritual principles, psy- 
 chological qualities, ethical forces, figured as persons, in 
 true Iranian fashion. The processes of emanation became 
 successive ^ojis, — genealogical periods, or stages of spir- 
 itual descent, — further conceived as male and female, 
 combined in syzygies, in whose opposition lay a real 
 conjunction and completeness. By this emanative series, 
 this descent of principles, not in time, but in the order of 
 psychological function, the Pleroma, or fulness of Being, 
 was supposed to become the basis of changes and de- 
 scending degrees, by which the existence and experience 
 of man were intellectually explicable without separating 
 
5o6 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 him from the life of God. All this mediation was of course 
 an elaborate symbol, which could only stand for reality to 
 the eyes of anthropomorphism. In the same way Evil, 
 conceived as a principle as far as possible removed from 
 God, uncreated and unchangeable, could only become 
 the ground of the soul's imprisonment and release by the 
 interaction of ethical forces in dramatic personal action. 
 On the other hand, how far this was believed with mytho- 
 logical faith, how far recognized by the reason as poetic 
 symbol of rational truth, it is not easy to say. But it is 
 certain that the whole process rested on philosophical foun- 
 dations ; that the yEons and the powers, however personi- 
 fied, me2in\. principles, and followed the logic of principles. 
 J^on was ael-oi', everlasting reality, like the Platonic Idea, 
 lifted above all personal conditions and limitations ; as in 
 the Persian Ameska-^pentas, the personal garb, with which 
 language was obliged to clothe them, was transparent to 
 the abstract quality they represented, and served but to 
 make this quality more real. The Church, which had car- 
 ried anthropomorphism to the extent of regarding Jesus 
 of Nazareth as the flesh and blood of God, and personified 
 evil in an everlasting kingdom of Satan and his hosts, held 
 this Gnostic epos to be blasphemy. It was perfectly true 
 to its claim of an exclusive revelation, in calling this pro- 
 duct of human reason " vain babblings and antitheses of 
 a spurious gnosis ; " i " rudiments of the cosmos, not after 
 Christ;"^ " fables and genealogies ministering questions, 
 rather than building up in faith; "^ "antichrist, denying 
 Christ come in the flesh ; " * " commandments and doc- 
 trines of men ; " ^ " opinions read from what is not written ; " 
 " adaptations of the oracles of God to baseless fictions."^ 
 
 Apart from all these matters in dispute, in which both 
 parties seem far enough from the religious science of our 
 
 1 I Timothy, vi. 20. ' Colossians, ii. 8. ^ i Timothy, i. 4. 
 
 * I John, iv. 3. ® Colossians, ii. 22. 
 
 ^ Irensus : Against Heresies, i. viii. i. 
 
GNOSTICISM. 507 
 
 time, the main question, on which really hinged all others, 
 was whether reason goes behind revelation and tests it. 
 For the Christian, revelation had settled all questions, 
 and reason must begin and end with implicit faith in Christ 
 as centre and sum of all. It was the heresy of the Gnostic 
 that he put Christ among the ALons, in a chain of Being, 
 so that it was only in a secondary sense that he was the 
 fulness (^Plerovia) of God. To attempt philosophizing 
 on his relations with the Father beyond his own positive 
 teaching, to make the Only Begotten (^Monogcnes) a sepa- 
 rate ^on from the Christ, and the Wisdom {^Noiis) of 
 God yet another ^on, and to deny that the man Jesus 
 was either of the three, was to Christian simplicity to put 
 vain babbling for an all-sufficient and authoritative faith. 
 It was not the use of these and other terms familiar to 
 Gnostic reasoning that the Church found so mischievous, — 
 they all belonged to the familiar intellectual phraseology of 
 the age, — but simply the use of them for other purposes 
 than to celebrate the incarnation of God in the man Jesus. 
 Paul and John had already appropriated them, and the 
 early Fathers are greatly concerned to show that they have 
 found their only meaning in Jesus. They shall no longer 
 retain their free relation to philosophical thought. Plero- 
 ma. Logos, Grace {Charts'), Truth {Alcthcia), Life (^Zoc), 
 Only Begotten {Mo7wge7ies') , - — these Gnostic powers are all 
 in the proem of John's Gospel confidently appropriated to 
 Jesus.i Paul had taught the Wisdom {Sophia) of God " z« 
 a mystery," "before all ^ons," that centred in the humanity 
 of Jesus ; ^ yet he would not allow the Gnostics also to 
 humanize Wisdom, by making their own Sophia learn by 
 experience the lesson of trust in limit {Horos), and in the 
 fulness of God, which was her home. Clement of Alexan- 
 dria says the true Gnostic condemns lust, and is patient 
 
 ^ See rlso Ephesians, iii. 14. i Timothy, i. 17. i John, ii. i ; iii. 16. 
 2 I Coiinthians, ii. 7. 
 
508 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 under trial. ^ Inconsistencies like these are part of the 
 traditional method of Christian apologists in dealing with 
 heresy down to the present moment, even among the most 
 enlightened of the class. They belong to the necessities 
 of the revelation doctrine. 
 
 Irenaeus, who abhors the dramatic personifications and 
 genealogical fictions of the Gnostics, can indulge in Old 
 Testament types and prefigurations of Christ, of the most 
 fanciful description.'-^ Hippolytus, who charges these here- 
 tics with gross superstition, has a hell prepared for them 
 worthy of Dante, with fiery lake and eyes of demons, 
 and worms that prey on the corruption that breeds them.^ 
 The power of working miracles, raising the dead, and cast- 
 ing out demons, which the orthodox called blasphemous 
 and lying magic in Simon Magus and his successors, they 
 did not hesitate to adduce as conclusive evidence, in the 
 case of their Master and his apostles, that their religion 
 was true and their commission divine."^ The charge that 
 the Gnostics despised the multitude as incapable of hear- 
 ing and receiving the higher gnosis, came with ill grace 
 from the followers of Paul teaching the wisdom of God 
 " in a mystery," ^ addressing his own converts " not as 
 spiritual but as carnal, and to be fed with milk and not 
 with meat; "^ and describing the gospel as 2l gnosis, whose 
 possession raised one above the weaker minds around himj 
 It would be difficult to find a more self-exalting contempt 
 for the spiritual capacities of all who were outside of the 
 pale of a special faith than is found in the writings of the 
 Fathers of the early Christian centuries ; the broadest and 
 freest of whom, Clement of Alexandria, pronounces the 
 multitude " swinish," so that after the example of his Mas- 
 ter he fears to cast his pearls before them, and like Paul 
 
 1 Stromata, ii. 20. ' Irenjeus : Against Heresies, bk. iii. chap. xi. 
 
 2 Hippolytus : Refutation of all Heresies, x. 30. 
 * Iren^us : Against Heresies, ii. xxxi. 2. 
 
 ^ I Corinthians, ii. 7. "^ i Corinthians, iii. i, 2. ^ Ibid., viii. 10. 
 
GNOSTICISM. 509 
 
 holds it " requisite to hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken 
 by the Son of God," because " to the natural man the 
 things of God are foohshness." ^ " The wise do not utter 
 with the mouth what they reason in councih" It cannot 
 be said that this csotericism was incidental in these teach- 
 ers of the Christian gospel. It belonged to the spirit of 
 their Master to speak in parables, as to those who " having 
 ears, could not hear," and to confine the naked truth to the 
 chosen few. That this distinction was to a certain extent 
 indispensable, is not to be doubted ; but the Gnostic had 
 certainly an equal right with the orthodox to recognize 
 the necessity. The implicit faith (^pistis) of the latter was 
 at least as marked by spiritual pride as the gnosis of the 
 other by intellectual. It demanded of the convert a most 
 difficult renunciation of religious traditions and worldly in- 
 terests and cares, and fostered, for this reason alone, an 
 intense feeling of self-complacency and exaltation above 
 the carnal world. Think for a moment with what spir- 
 itual conceit, far more absolute than is now possible for the 
 most confident orthodox church-member, the baptized and 
 elected member of Christ's body must have regarded the 
 outside millions, in view of the speedy approach of the 
 end of the world and the coming of Christ in judgment, 
 to separate the sheep from the goats. If the Gnostic had 
 his elect, separated by initiations and harder vows from the 
 class of hearers, like the antique mysteries of Mithra and 
 of Zeus, the Christian erected the same method into an 
 institution which has survived to the present day, and re- 
 sisted every assault but that of scientific law. There was 
 certainly no more contempt of human capacity involved 
 in the Gnostic saying that " not one in a thousand persons 
 could understand the mysteries of divine knowledge"^ 
 (which saying Irenaeus totally misrepresented),^ than in 
 
 1 Clement : Stromata, i. xii. ^ Clement : Stromata. 
 
 3 Irensus : Against Heresies, i. xxiv. See Renan : P Eglise Chrctienne, 165. 
 
5IO PHILOSOPHIES, 
 
 the orthodox Christians saying that the truths of their 
 revelation were beyond the unaided reason of mankind 
 itself, and appropriable only through the supernatural 
 mission of their Scriptures and their Christ. 
 
 In the harsh sketches of the opinions and life of the 
 Gnostics, drawn by their enemies, who signalized their 
 victory by destroying the writings in which we might 
 have read what the accused had to say in their own de- 
 fence, we find not a few things laid to their charge which 
 seem to us highly creditable to their freedom and sense. 
 Their belief that the resurrection day was of the past, not 
 in the future, which struck the orthodox with horror, was 
 evidently a spiritualized definition of resurrection as a 
 new birth of the soul out of the old body of darkness 
 and evil, rather than a common mechanical rising of all 
 bodies at once on a judgment day, to receive Divine sen- 
 tence upon their mere flesh and blood, — all which could 
 not but seem to the anti-materialism of the Gnostic a 
 pure absurdity. He could, indeed, point to a doctrine 
 substantially similar to his own in the noblest production 
 of the Christian Church, — the Gospel of John. Clement 
 quotes Basilides as saying, " I will affirm anj^thing rather 
 than call Providence evil ; " ^ in which his meaning (con- 
 fusedly interpreted, and as confusedly refuted by the 
 critic) seems to ha\e been, that even in the sufferings 
 of good men there must be some ground of compensa- 
 tion, or justice, that makes the ways of Providence less 
 dark. After wading through the tangled logic of the refu- 
 tation, one can nowise help siding, so far as the contro- 
 versy is concerned, with the spirit, at least, of the Gnostic's 
 sentence. 
 
 Irenaeus declares it to be malignant in the Gnostics to 
 argue from the orthodox premise, that heaven is God's 
 throne and the earth His footstool, that, if this be so, then 
 
 • Clement : Stroiiiaia, iv. 12. 
 
GNOSTICISM 511 
 
 God will pass away when these pass away, and that this 
 God cannot therefore be the highest, but only an inferior 
 or world-building one.^ He thinks it proof of their im- 
 morality that they visit theatres and shows, and eat meats 
 offered to idols ; ^ of their impiety, that they put up im- 
 ages of Christ by the side of images of Plato, Pythagoras, 
 and Aristotle,^ and that they declared themselves to 
 have abandoned Judaism, yet without becoming Chris- 
 tians.* These data would rather indicate that their tenden- 
 cies were to a more natural and rational philosophy than 
 that of their opponents. So strongly were they persuaded 
 that the Mosaic religion, by reason of its anthropomor- 
 phism, was the product of blindness or perverseness, or of 
 imperfection of some kind, that some of them interpreted 
 it by contradiction, and defended the personages repre- 
 sented in it as evil, — such as Cain, Esau, Korah, the 
 Sodomites, whom they declared to have been misrepre- 
 sented, and stretched the same canon so far as to cover 
 the Judas of the New Testament writers. How they in- 
 terpreted the Fall of Adam and Eve has already been 
 noticed. Marcion called the Old Testament ideal, justice 
 without goodness ; wherein there was a degree of truth, 
 at least as he understood the words. Other Gnostics re- 
 pudiated it as evil in a more positive sense, and all 
 regarded it as inferior, and its God as unintentionally sub- 
 serving a higher will. On the other hand, the earliest 
 Christian Gnosticism (to which also Mahometanism is be- 
 lieved by Sprenger to go back) seems to have been a 
 Judaistic rejection of that growing tendency to deify the 
 man Jesus, which was contrary to the whole genius of 
 traditional Judaism; and out of this gradually grew a com- 
 plete Docetic theory, explaining the New Testament life 
 of Jesus, so far as the incarnation of the Spirit of God was 
 
 * Irenaus : Against Heresies, iv. 3. ^ Ibid., i. vi. 3. 
 
 ^ Ibid., i. XXV. 6. * Ibid., i. xxiv. 
 
512 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 concerned, as an illusion.^ Docetism is not an easy thing 
 for us to comprehend. Probably, as has been already said, 
 it was not a very clear matter to the Gnostics themselves, 
 but hovered in a mystic dream, as illusory in its way as 
 that flcsh-and-blood Christ which it denied. The Gnostics 
 differed widely among themselves as to the person of Jesus, 
 — from Carpocrates, who regarded him as simply human, 
 and Basilides, who regarded him as a man on whom the 
 true Christ alighted, but without really becoming one with 
 him, to the pure Docetism of Valentinus and Marcion, 
 who held that his whole external appearance was dramatic 
 and illusory, because the spirit could have no conjunction 
 whatever with flesh and blood.^ But all refused to deify 
 the person of Jesus, as they refused to accept the Mosaic 
 God. This they did in order to exalt their " Christ of the 
 Spirit," in whom they found the deliverer of the fallen 
 Wisdom of God imprisoned in the outside darkness of 
 matter, and so the redeemer of man and of the world. So 
 far as this had they accepted Christianity in an ideal and 
 mystical form. But, then, this ideal Christ was simply an 
 ALon, though representing the Pleroma ; and the vast chain 
 of cosmical causes and effects of which his person and 
 function proved but a step was welded by the rationalistic 
 logic of necessary law. 
 
 We have here the essence of the claim of reason, on 
 the part of the Gnostics, to determine religious conviction. 
 They pursued therein an aspiration to maintain the perfect 
 purity of the idea of God as an offset to their profound 
 sense of evil in the world of matter and man. This con- 
 sciousness of evil as positive and overwhelming was the 
 great burden of the age, analogous to the transmigration 
 dogma whose reaction was Nirvana in the remoter East. 
 
 ^ See Basilides in Beausobre, ii. 25. Marcion in Hippolytus, vii. ig. Tertullian : 
 Against Marcion^ iii. viii. Bardesanes in Beausobre, ii. 157. Saturninus in Irenaeus, 
 j. xxiv. * See Baur: Gnosis. 
 
GNOSTICISM. 513 
 
 The dualistic religions of Gnosticism and Christianity were 
 indeed varied expressions of this; and with all their differ- 
 ences, it was this that determined them to a common pur- 
 pose, — that of emancipating humanity from its apparent 
 doom. While Christianity concentrated its hope on an 
 incarnation of God as the only sufficient refuge for man, 
 Gnosticism, anticipating the final decision of the ages on 
 the question, clung to the pure idea of perfection in God ; 
 and by jealously guarding this at every point, found in it 
 the all-sufhcient guarantee for a divine process of restora- 
 tion, whose steps, following the law of the ideal, should in 
 nowise invalidate that rest for the soul. The Gnostic mind 
 was bent on maintaining the absolute separation of the 
 ideal Supreme from all implication in moral and physical 
 evil, as a fixed inviolable centre through which all spiritual 
 problems could find solution. Its philosophy of Dualism 
 was a mystical flight out of evil to the bosom of God, as 
 orthodoxy was an equally mystical descent of God into 
 the limitations and imperfections which were the con- 
 ditions of evil. But Gnosticism further affirmed that 
 neither the ascent nor the descent was conceivable as an 
 instant fiat; that man could not enter the Highest, nor 
 the Highest be transformed into humanity, without inter- 
 mediate gradations of being, and the sacred transitions of 
 psychical law. To express these, it aimed to bring the 
 free play of the religious imagination, which had filled 
 these spaces of the ideal with innumerable mythic beings 
 and the boundless license of poetic legend, representing 
 every phase of human feeling in the earlier religions of 
 Greece, Egypt, and Persia, under strict conditions of ration- 
 ality. Thus to their religious reason the principle of 
 emanation had a very similar necessity to the principle of 
 evolution in modern science. They refused to sacrifice 
 this law of continuity to the catastrophe of miracle. The 
 super-sensual was not super-rational. The goodness of God 
 
 33 
 
514 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 must be justified, not by sacrificing reason, but by making 
 it divine. So early, in muffled tones, pealed the death- 
 knell of supernaturalism, at the very outset of the contro- 
 versy of the Christian Church. 
 
 But this jealousy for the purity of the Ideal intensifies 
 the opposite pole, and Evil is all the more concentrated in 
 the Gnostic conception of " matter," — as by Plato in an 
 analogous force of " necessity," a principle of disorder, — 
 in which the divine element of the soul finds itself impris- 
 oned, not indeed in essential union with it, which is im- 
 possible, but by a kind of external contact or immersion. 
 For the finite soul, escape from these bonds alone is its 
 real nature and life; and the assumption of them by the 
 Infinite (or Plcroma) is and must be unreal, and all appear- 
 ance of it an illusion. At the very moment, then, when 
 Jesus was coming to be regarded as God in the flesh, arose 
 the Gnostic affirmation that the thing was impossible ; a 
 human personal body of God was a fiction. If the deliver- 
 ing Christ seemed to walk and work in living shape in 
 Judea and Galilee, it was a phantasm ; the reality was no 
 visible life, suffering, and death, but invisible, in the soul 
 of the believer, who received the saving gnosis, which did 
 not come by observation. 
 
 Thus the Docetic Christ of the Gnostic and the super- 
 natural Christ of the Church are alike impossible schemes 
 for bringing God in the form of a personal saviour into 
 relation with man as fallen and alienated from good, — the 
 one by illusion, the other by miracle ; and both are signs 
 of the entire absence of a genuine historical sense in that 
 period, the rapid evaporation of positive fact into nebulous 
 mists, which took such shape as best suited the cravings 
 of reason or faith. It is curious to observe that the diffi- 
 culty of reconciling the records of Jesus' life and death 
 with the rights of rational science in modern times has 
 given rise to an obscuration of historical facts and laws 
 
GNOSTICISM. 515 
 
 very similar to ancient Docetism. There is a semi-mystical 
 school of " Christian rationalists " who speak of the re- 
 corded life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as if they were 
 to be considered merely as facts of the spiritual experience, 
 treating the question of their historical validity as of no 
 importance ; in other words, as if they were phantasmal, 
 while at the same time claiming the Christian name and 
 dogma, which rests upon their historical reality alone. 
 
 Nor did either the Gnostic or Christian form of Dualism 
 suffice to bring under one solution the opposing principles 
 of moral and physical good and evil. According to the 
 Christian, evil was the work of Satan, possessing and per- 
 verting the will of man, and Nature through the fall of 
 man. According to the Gnostic, it was the cosmic preter- 
 human energy of the principle of darkness aroused to 
 creative work by the fall of the youngest of the yEons from 
 the pure Pleroma, through ambition to expand from her 
 proper sphere. In both alike the principle of evil remains 
 at last as it was in the beginning, — unchanged, and fast in 
 its inherent antagonism to good.^ But there still remains 
 a hint of instinctive psychological science in this myth of 
 the wandering ^on, whose blind ambition to drop her true 
 functions for a vaster sovereignty led to the sorrows and 
 sins of the world. She is that inferior Wisdom {Sophia), 
 who signifies, after all, that the vice in human faculties is 
 not in essence, but in excess. Thus the worship of Reason 
 proved itself able to combine with a jealous care for the 
 exaltation of the ideal an equal recognition of human 
 
 1 Plato's conception of evil in Timirus is not unlike the Gnostic idea of the roots of that 
 scheme of things, — an antagonism of order and disorder, creation and necessity, the unor- 
 ganizable or lawless element in substance, — which the good Demiurge can only partially work 
 up, and which mixes with the souls he makes, each out of an immortal with two mortal ones 
 and a bodv, thus foredooming it to corruption and stupidity so far. (See Grote's Plato, chap, 
 xxxvi.) Positive evil is also for Plato in sexual love ; since he allows none of it in his guar- 
 dians (Reptiblic), who must be coupled, for generative purposes, according to prescribed 
 rules, by officials of the State, of course without mutual affection. Thus the whole scheme 
 of creation fails, though the cosmos is all beauty. Women and animals are the result of 
 degenerate men. 
 
5l6 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 limitations. While worshippers of Reason, the Gnostics 
 beheved that Reason was separated from her native hght 
 so long as she failed to accept the guidance of Horos, — 
 personification of limit. In other words, it is the sense of 
 her ignorance {agnoia) that brings her (even the intellect, 
 not the passions and pride of man alone) back to the 
 bosom of the Pleroma, — ■ that sense of ignorance which is 
 the beginning of real knowledge and salvation for the 
 highest philosophy and sainthood of every age and faith. 
 The new-coined modern word, " Agnosticism," already re- 
 ferred to, conveys a similar charge of pride and self- 
 sufficiency against the ancient Gnostics with that brought 
 by the early orthodox Christians; but the myth of the 
 wandering JEon, on which Gnostic philosophy turns,^ points 
 to the postulate of scientific inquiry, — that grand secret 
 of wisdom through humility, which belongs alike to the 
 ancient Socratic confession and to every honest and 
 thoughtful modern admission of doubts insoluble on long- 
 recognized foundations of religious belief The spirit of 
 this myth pervades all the Gnostic writings. The evil in 
 the world is due to blindness. The Demiurge is blind ; 
 the Old Testament is delusive. Error troubles even the 
 superhuman yEon world. The mighty drama of the wan- 
 dering and passion of Wisdom is solved in the restoration 
 of a knowledge of the Father, that brings joy to every JEon 
 in its place and work. The very symbol of Evil is the 
 darkness in which the soul cannot see ; that of Good is the 
 light which scatters every shadow of sin. In Christian eyes 
 it was the crime of these New Testament Magi that they 
 did not bring the pride of reason to the feet of the child 
 Jesus. They adored instead the Christ-star in the heaven 
 of thought. Their Christ was a divine ideal hovering over 
 
 ' See especially the system of Valentinus in Hippolytus, Philosophy, vi. ii. 31. Renan : 
 L'Eglise Chritienne, chap. ix. Irenseus, bk. iii. Matter ; Hisioire du GnoUicisme, bk. ii. 
 chap. iii. — '' Simonianism." 
 
GNOSTICISM. 517 
 
 Jesus indeed, as over the world, but not identical with him, 
 and of course only temporarily called by the name of 
 Christ, — the star of their active reason, not of a blind, 
 implicit faith. They refused to impoverish the intelligible 
 world by leaving but a single intermediate being between 
 the Highest and the spheres of recognized bondage and 
 limitation. Protesting against the Jewish and Christian 
 systems for ascribing human and physical attributes to the 
 highest God, they assigned all lower grades of emanation to 
 anthropomorphic personages, and imported into the Ple- 
 roma the human elements of generation and sex; not, 
 however, as the Christian writers understood them, in any 
 literal sense, but as the only types imaginable for that con- 
 tinuity of being by which they sought to bridge the spirit- 
 ual immensities between God and man. In the most de- 
 veloped systems every grade of the descent was a union 
 {syzjgia) of male and female yEons ; in the less elaborated 
 ones, and in some form in all, a primal representative of 
 the Holy Spirit, or a central figure in the mighty drama of 
 fall and renovation, was of the female sex.^ But this was 
 scarcely less characteristic of heathen, and of orthodox 
 Christian, mythology than of the Gnostic ; and in all alike 
 the highest functions, the creative and redeeming, belonged 
 to the male, — all of which shows how entirely ancient 
 mythology and theology were a reflection of actual human 
 institutions and relations. 
 
 Of Gnostic Dualism, and its analogy both with the Dual- 
 ism of early and mediaeval Christianity, and with the 
 Dualism of modern science, we have already spoken in 
 the exposition of Manichaeism, as well as in the present 
 chapter. Of what may be regarded as the characteris- 
 tic feature of Gnosticism, -~ the endeavor to express the 
 
 1 The Gnostic hymns of Bardesanes, celebrating the mythic marriage of the restored 
 Sophia with Christos, were analogous to those of the Christian fathers in honor of the union 
 of Christ with the Church, also symbolized as a female. See account of Manichsan system. 
 
5l8 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 idea of God as an active process, a series of processes, 
 in terms of the intellect, — we need only say, that it was 
 a development of the manifold intellectual traditions of 
 the age. Such an age could not but combine with its pro- 
 found aspirations towards unity and fulness in Deity the 
 need of gathering into the life of this divine Plcroma 
 the ideal meaning of all those spiritual relations which 
 polytheism had put into mythological forms. The con- 
 versation on divine and human things which had been 
 scattered through the mouths of the unnumbered gods 
 of old was refined and concentred within the living fulness 
 of one all-embracing Reason, communing with itself of 
 eternal truths and laws.^ What the Amesha-^pentas and 
 the Ferouers were to Ormuzd, what the Olympians were 
 to Zeus, — the Platonic ideas, the Alexandrian emanations, 
 and the Gnostic ^ons were to these pantheistic forms of 
 deity from which they certainly and naturally flowed ; with 
 this difference, that they did not stand outside of the all- 
 containing Deity. They were the intelligible forms and 
 relations of his interior life, ideal types of those processes 
 which seemed essential to the rational conception of God. 
 This concentration was itself one step of intellectual abstrac- 
 tion ; and the power which swept the gods of antiquity 
 into a higher and purer unity in the religious conscious- 
 ness was akin to the processes of modern science ; that is, 
 it was essentially intellectual. For in Platonism, still more 
 in Neoplatonism, this abstraction went so far as substan- 
 tially to substitute ideas for persons. With the Gnostics, it 
 
 1 " The Gnostic schools of Egypt found in the old doctrines of that country all the funda- 
 mental ideas of their system, — supreme unknown Being, hidden in mystery at the beginning, 
 successively revealing himself by a series of spirits emanating in syzygies, from his bosom or 
 from one another, and who govern in his name the visible world ; spirits one of whom, his 
 particular agent, is the creator, and the others share with him the government of the world, 
 while others still conduct mortals to whom they have imparted, in creating their souls, some 
 rays of the divine life. Next, they found a mass of secondary theories, myths, traditions, 
 a-..d symbols, which they worked up as their Qwn." -^ Matter : Histqire critique du Gtios- 
 iicisme, i. chap, v. 
 
GNOSTICISM. 519 
 
 allowed the qualities and relations that were idealized to re- 
 clothc themselves in an imaginative dramatic form, and the 
 life of God glowed with the tragedy of human experience. 
 Plato, too, adds to his Ideas a quasi existence of all the 
 Greek gods, in his demiurgic cosmos.^ Analogous to this 
 was the Christian trinity, itself a dramatic gnosis, in which 
 three persons in one God, — Father, Son, and Spirit, — 
 conceived under the old figure of generation, though every 
 member is male, consult, create, decree, divide their func- 
 tions into infinite and finite, and the relations between 
 them, and enact the great tragedy of human condemna- 
 tion and redemption in as completely anthropomorphic 
 a manner as the Gnostic ^Eons themselves. And around 
 this vast personal drama — into which, as in the Gnostic 
 Mother of Life, or Sophia, a female element, a " Mother 
 of God" or of Christ, enters as an essential figure — have 
 revolved the hopes and fears of sixteen centuries of believ- 
 ing Christendom. This Christian gnosis has retained its 
 dependence on the play of personal figures to the vh^ 
 last. It ultimates in the religio-philosophical formulas of 
 modern Hegelianism (a mechanical synthesis of Gnostic 
 and Christian analogies), in which the supposed laws of 
 absolute thought are presented in their fullest abstraction, 
 and then identified with the distinctly personal and eccles- 
 iastical traditions of Christianity. Instead of preserving 
 their validity as intellectual abstractions, they are deliber- 
 ately swamped in the utterly imperfect personalities of a 
 special religion, which was formed at a period previous to 
 the most important steps in the development of individual 
 and social humanity, and is incapable of representing its 
 ultimate collective powers. 
 
 If the Alexandrian philosophy, — that of Plotinus, for ex- 
 ample, — after pursuing the track of speculative intellect to 
 the sublimest abstractions of pure Being possible to man, 
 
 1 TintcEus. Grote : History 0/ Greece, i. chap. xvi. p. 410, n. 
 
520 PHILOSOPHIES. 
 
 and approached only by those of the highest thinkers of 
 India, had not only retained pure and perfect faith in these 
 results as intellectual verities in proportion to their all- 
 embracing pantheism, their exaltation above human limi- 
 tation, but had furthermore pursued with equal earnestness 
 the ethical and practical side of the logical polarity, the 
 human as Jiuvian, the two worlds would have flowed to- 
 gether, as they do in Nature, and a thoroughly free religion, 
 at once scientific and intuitive, would have been the neces- 
 sary result of these free conditions. Principles only being 
 recognized as the substance of the universe, the ethical 
 requirements and affectional demands of human nature 
 and all its practical interests would have found their no- 
 blest basis in the laws of essential being, not only above 
 all caprices of will, but valid alike at every height of in- 
 tellectual abstraction and in every detail of individual life. 
 Such unity of God and man was impossible in ages when 
 the rights of the intellect could find freedom only in the 
 superhuman sphere, and in that but rarely; while the ethi- 
 cal and religious nature, on the other hand, could find no 
 culture in the study of man and the world. But this divine 
 synthesis, before which all past religions and philosophies 
 pale, because there is even now a vision of that complete 
 whole of which these are fragments, may well be the out- 
 come of the tendencies we are privileged to behold. The 
 distinctive postulate of Gnostic, and we may say of all 
 ancient thought, in all religions, down to scientific times, — 
 of a creative Spirit, unfolding itself in degrees of descent; 
 of a series, greater or less in number, of personal emana- 
 tions connecting them with the human soul; and of a fall 
 of the lowest member of the series, as of a multitude of 
 souls through sin, into imprisonment within a hostile sub- 
 stance or principle, which could not be excluded from 
 existence and hostility, and the deliverance of the same 
 through the descent of a supernatural Power, — is opposed 
 
GNOSTICISM. 521 
 
 to the present conception of the world of mind and matter. 
 No such positive antagonisms and absolutely dissevered 
 elements as those of good and evil, of spirit and matter, 
 of supernatural and natural, of God and man, are now 
 assumed as real at opposite poles of the universe. There 
 is no necessity for bridging an essential chasm between 
 Perfect Light and Utter Darkness. Absolute Negation 
 is a monster, and no reality in man or Nature. The In- 
 finite and the Finite are one whole, inseparable, a divine 
 evolution of perfect law. For that transcendental energy 
 by which man passes beyond the finite phenomena of his 
 experience to the unconditional universalities of law, and 
 perceives the identity of mind with whatsoever it can see 
 or know, has reached a free self-consciousness never pos- 
 sible before. It commands the cosmic realm of science 
 and the common aspirations of mind and soul, never more 
 to be foreclosed. 
 
ISLAM. 
 
 I. 
 
 MAHOMET. 
 
•/ 
 
 MAHOMET. 
 
 'T^HE scientific study of religious development reveals a 
 -^ continuous progress towards the recognition of Being 
 in its wholeness; in other words, of the universe as Infinite 
 and as One. In conformity with this natural process of 
 growth, the movement of every race is from polytheistic 
 to monotheistic belief, — never in the reverse direction. 
 Whenever man has become capable of a self-conscious 
 study of his relations to life and the world, he has in- 
 evitably arrived at a monarchical form of worship. If 
 we look closely at this stage in the evolution of ideal 
 conceptions, we shall find that it consists in the integra- 
 tion of Personality. Its representative has always been 
 an omnipotent conscious Self, an exclusive Sovereign, 
 endowed with all the ideal qualities of Will. This con- 
 ception, of which the Semitic race has aft'orded the most 
 exalted types, — in Jahveh, Allah, and the more spiritual 
 and interior humanity of the Christian God, — has hitherto 
 guaranteed to that intensely self-conscious race an undis- 
 puted leadership of civilization in matters of religion. 
 This is the secret of its threefold sovereignty in the 
 West. 
 
 But the monarchical idea is, after all, but a transient 
 stage in that great historic process by which man is seek- 
 ing the significance of his demand for unity. Both intel- 
 lectually and morally it has proved unsatisfying. Its 
 phases have been persistently interrupted, and invariably 
 succeeded by powerful impulses of a mystical and panthe- 
 istic, or of a secular and scientific, nature towards a more 
 
526 ISLAM. 
 
 or less impersonal worship of ideas, principles, laws, — hints 
 of the monistic or cosmic religion yet to come. They are 
 to be justified, not as finalities, but as the ideal expression of 
 man's progress in the knowledge of his own personality. 
 
 Thus Polytheism embodied the spontaneous life of man's 
 instincts, unconscious and unstudied. Dualism reflected 
 the advent of his moral self-consciousness, — the sense of 
 a divided will. Monotheism came in with the more phi- 
 losophical, or at least more distinct, comprehension of 
 individuality, — of the will as central, supreme source of 
 thought and conduct. The demand for an external and 
 universal form of this sovereignty, corresponding to the 
 inward and private, is the necessary parent of all religious 
 revelations through chosen messengers or organs. 
 
 The strongest mark of anthropomorphic limitation in all 
 forms of personal worship is the identification of the Di- 
 vine perfection with some human representative. The old 
 Babylonian and Assyrian kings not only visibly represented 
 a host of deities, but absorbed every god into their own 
 colossal divinity. In the same way even those rehgions 
 which claimed to be revelations from an invisible and in- 
 scrutable God, — whether the Persian, the Hebrew, the 
 Christian, or the Mahometan, — simply substituted the 
 Prophet, Messiah, or God-man for the older god-absorbing 
 kings. Whatever the moral and spiritual difference, the 
 form of the religious process was the same : it was iden- 
 tification of an individual Master with the absolute Will. 
 Private inspirations were accepted as the omnipotent 
 Word. 
 
 If monarchical religion has proved unable to distinguish 
 the infinite from the finite, it has equally failed of sepa- 
 rating the temporal from the spiritual sphere of authority. 
 Its ideal, based on personal self-consciousness, can become 
 thoroughly consistent with its own premises only by ac- 
 cording to the one absolute Will, as revealed by its Prophet 
 
MAHOMET. 527 
 
 or Messiah, an undivided sway over every human relation. 
 His warrant from a Supreme Purpose involves the right to 
 legislate at once for the inward and the outward life of 
 man ; to be master alike of reason and law ; to enforce 
 obedience, as well as to persuade and inspire. His posi- 
 tive commandments can tolerate no rival authority. There 
 is no more question of limit in the claims of a man who 
 reveals God's will to the nations, than in those of a man 
 whose own will rules the nations as their God. Every 
 monarchical religion has logically and devoutly resorted 
 to the sword of the flesh, and by that means established 
 itself in the world. In no other way could it fulfil its con- 
 scious function of executing the commands of a supreme 
 personal Will. 
 
 The real justification before the bar of history for this 
 personal integration of the religious ideal is its necessity 
 as a step towards the integration of Being itself, as uni- 
 versal Substance and immanent Force. Hitherto it has 
 been the highest aspiration of the great historic religions 
 to purify and elevate this basis on which they stand, so 
 that it tends at the present day to become absorbed in 
 those larger conceptions of which it is but the forerunner. 
 On the other hand, in so far as such positive faiths have 
 succeeded in persistently following their principles to their 
 logical result, their inadequacy to meet man's growing 
 knowledge of his relations has become the more palpable. 
 Of this truth our studies in the genesis of religions and 
 their later fruits have afforded abundant proofs. 
 
 But not the less do we recognize the immense service 
 to humanity, whenever the natural movement of past ages 
 towards a moral and spiritual centre of worship has been 
 lifted out of apparent disaster and even failure by some 
 fresh announcement of positive commands from a supreme 
 personal Will. In such emergencies, no other evidence has 
 been possible of the unfailing power of human nature to 
 
528 ISLAM. 
 
 hold its upward track. In the chaos of warring nations 
 and contending creeds, of spiritual distraction and moral 
 enervation, the all-directing message has been surely pre- 
 paring its way. 
 
 Thrice has the Semite performed this commanding 
 function of personating a revelation by virtue of the inten- 
 sity of his own self-conscious will, — in Judaism, in Chris- 
 tianity, in Islam. In all these the monarchical ideal 
 demanded universal sway, — social, political, religious. In 
 all it was successful in pressing personal worship to the 
 farthest logical limits, and preparing the race to demand a 
 larger liberty than itself could bestow. In Christianity and 
 Islam its application of force to every sphere of human 
 experience was as direct as supernatural authority, armed 
 with corresponding social and political resources, could 
 secure. In Judaism it was more indirect, yet able to wield 
 in history a moral absolutism which even these more 
 powerful successors could not equal. All the three were 
 great historical necessities ; greatest in this, — that their 
 virtues and their faults alike pointed beyond themselves, 
 to relations with truth and duty more natural, immediate, 
 and free. 
 
 We have now reached the critical moment in the history 
 of Iran when one of these colossal waves of concentrated 
 Will was gathered up to engulf the religious and political 
 life of the Eastern world. 
 
 The opening of the seventh century was an epoch of 
 disintegration, — national, social, and religious. Its phe- 
 nomena were such as have always involved a fresh form of 
 positive faith, to recall all wandering forces into the inevit- 
 able track of spiritual evolution, towards the integration of 
 personal worship. Their whole significance centred in the 
 demand for a more positive revelation than that attained 
 by Christianity itself, in the name of the Unity of God. 
 The exhausting wars of Rome and Persia hopelessly 
 
MAHOMET. 529 
 
 divided the civilized world. Every efifort of an autocratic 
 Justinian to unite his Roman empire under the Christian 
 faith and law had gone down in the sack of cities and the 
 ashes of a thousand altar-fires. The utter failure of Zoro- 
 astrian Dualism and Christian Trinitarianism to coalesce, 
 in an age confusedly stirred by the experience of universal 
 interests and relations, showed that a deeper current than 
 either of these beliefs was setting towards a more perfect 
 concentration of the religious ideal. Never since the first 
 days of Christianity had the demand for assured trust in 
 one Supreme Will been so sharply goaded by irrecon- 
 cilable strifes and pretensions. The endless battle of sects 
 about the twofold nature of Christ and the inner logic of 
 tripersonality, which no decree of Czesar or formula of bish- 
 ops could abate; the world-wide crusade against the irre- 
 pressible Manichee, by both his natural parents, the Church 
 of Zoroaster and the Church of Christ; the prodigious 
 fertility of Sassanian Persia in sects, orthodox and ration- 
 alistic, of every shade, and alive with every seed of that 
 mighty intellectual ferment of the next four centuries, 
 which Iran was destined to bequeath to Islam in the splen- 
 did days of the Caliphate; the special strife of west-Iranian 
 Magism, fast anchored in its dualistic traditions, with hereti- 
 cal Zendiks working out their higher synthesis of Zrvan 
 in the more spiritual Iran of the East; above all, that free 
 opening of all intellectual paths by the great Nushirvan, 
 whose hospitality, while Mahomet was yet in his infancy, 
 had flooded Persia with Greek and Christian philosophies 
 and Buddhist asceticism and the oldest wisdom of the far 
 East, and spread on all the winds the subtle disputes of 
 her famous schools of Balkh, Samarkand, Nishapur, Merv, 
 and Herat, astounding the simple Moslem conqueror, who 
 knew only his sublime solitary Allah, with her rival obser- 
 vatories and libraries, from Tartary to Babylon, — such 
 were some elements of the situation before us. How inter- 
 
 34 
 
530 ISLAM. 
 
 pret this unspeakable uproar of tongues and swords, — 
 this wild, tempestuous collision of beliefs? What was this 
 whirl of fiery atoms, but a chaos awaiting its centripetal 
 impulse from intense religious personality; some fresh so- 
 lution for traditional names of duty in ages and tribes ; 
 some all-commanding cry of AlldJi-il-AlldJi, — ** There is 
 no God but God ! Behold his Prophet ! " 
 
 What made Islam was the law that the worship of per- 
 sons shall press irresistibly towards the worship of One 
 Person ; and that revelation by a direct messenger, which 
 is the proper exponent of that sovereignty, shall tend to 
 clothe itself with increasing definiteness and exclusiveness 
 of sway. It must show, in proof of its authenticity, the 
 power to bring both soul and body, every faculty and 
 function of man, under its positive decrees. Mahomet 
 understood the logical necessities of his position, when he 
 announced that a completer legislation than that of Abra- 
 ham, Moses, or Christ had come to reorganize the world. 
 
 His prophetic cry and conquering sword were not the 
 mere outbreak of an Arab fanatic, leading his desert 
 hordes to raid on the civilized world. An instinct so 
 powerful for seven centuries of civilization that it had 
 deepened with every outward contradiction and defeat, 
 had but come at last to speak with a clearness that could 
 neither be ignored nor misunderstood. Even the Semite 
 had been slow to reach the pure conception of one Su- 
 preme Will. But behind Mahomet's Allah lay the per- 
 sistent hold of Judaism on the religious training of ten 
 centuries, the later success of Christianity as its offspring, 
 and the primitive cultus of a Saturnian Abraham, or of 
 some other great Father of the Tribes from whom it was 
 itself born. ^ True, the new Prophet clearly saw that Juda- 
 ism had degenerated, till its old revelation was buried 
 under perversions and disputes. Christianity had further 
 
 * See the interesting researches of Julius Braun. 
 
MAHOMET. 531 
 
 depraved it by ascribing a Son to the Infinite Spirit, and 
 by dividing His essence. " Forbear, ye who say Three in- 
 stead of One ; it shall be better for you." But Christianity 
 had directly helped prepare his way. It had supplanted 
 the pantheons of Greece and Rome with its one incarnate 
 God. Its imperfect formulas of Divine Unity, such as they 
 were, had exercised a wide influence throughout Western 
 Asia by means of the Nestorian schools of S3^ria. These 
 heretics had pushed their protest against the strictly or- 
 thodox Trinity with a missionary ardor worthy of men 
 who had the ability to combine Greek philosophy with 
 Christian faith, and to establish ^ the earliest theological 
 institution in Christendom.^ They were nearer to pure 
 monotheism than the Church that had cast them out for 
 denying that God could have a mother, as it hated Ma- 
 homet for denying that He could have a Son. They must 
 have been in many ways unconscious furtherers of that 
 stronger religious monarchism which was to oversweep the 
 whole field of their labors. They could not fail to recog- 
 nize in its summons the clear self-consciousness of an ideal, 
 so long vainly sought by them in their internecine war of 
 systems and creeds. More " helpers " were in the air 
 than the great Arab knew, when he numbered his faith- 
 ful Ansdi' of Medina in the day of poverty and flight. 
 In differing ways the Monophysite heresy helped him 
 in Egypt, and the Arian in Spain. Their rapid expan- 
 sion indicated how strong an effort was making to guard 
 the unity of God from human alloy. The protest of rea- 
 son against a divided will had been borne about Arabia 
 on the dromedaries of a native king."'^ Every savage 
 broil in the robber councils of the Church, where her 
 bishops tore in pieces the sacred body of her God, helped 
 the preacher of a judgment day for these Typhonic muti- 
 
 1 At Nisibis. - Gieseler: Ecclesiastical History ,\\- 149. 
 
 2 Wright : Christianity in Arabia, p. 3S. Assemani {Biblioili. Orient., iii.)- 
 
532 . ISLAM. 
 
 lations. Widely separated and divergent tribes, unable to 
 endure the logic of orthodoxy, found timely refuge under 
 the religious banner of Islam, or at least under its military 
 guardianship, from the bigotry of Byzantium and the eccle- 
 siasticism of Rome. For aside from the one unqualified 
 condition of accepting its claim to political tribute from 
 all conquered tribes, Islam promised pure liberty of 
 thought. Arabia itself had long been a place of refuge, 
 as the desert has always been, for persecuted sects.^ The 
 fame of the old tribes of Yemen for religious tolerance was 
 great in all lands. The intuitive clearness of the Mussul- 
 man idea of God made its very stringency a relief to an 
 age oppressed by even more autocratic governments and 
 creeds. Its summons was to the masses, even more than 
 to scholars and theologians ; for religious controversy was 
 then, as afterwards in the fifteenth century in modern 
 Europe, the most tremendous of social realities. The 
 timeliness of its appeal was not shown most powerfully in 
 silencing the logomachy of Byzantine churches and Persian 
 schools, though its blade cut the knots of word-mongering 
 polemics at a single blow ; but, by gathering up the bewil- 
 dered races into one political and social centre of absolute 
 religious law, it proved itself the outgrowth of invincible 
 demands, — a sublime step in the process of the ages. 
 " Say to the common folk,^ Will }'e surrender yourselves 
 to God? " 
 
 With the facility of social predestination, as well as the 
 terrible earnestness of fanatical belief, Islam enforced the 
 logical right of positive revelation to sway every human 
 sphere. Like the old Babylonian monarchy, it justified 
 its claim to represent a God of personal Will by uniting 
 temporal and spiritual relations under a single uncon- 
 
 1 Cr'xchlon's Araiia, p. 160. 
 
 - Palmer translates, "Pagans" or "illiterate people;" but the meaning is the same. — 
 Koran, ili. ig. 
 
MAHOMET. 533 
 
 ditional allegiance to His spoken decrees. The invincible 
 laws of human reason, which this ideal would supersede, 
 had here, as elsewhere, brought it to the crucial test which 
 it involves, — just as Jewish theocracy had pushed for 
 universal dominion, and Christian evolution was steadily 
 marching to papal union of Church and State. Only the 
 secularism of modern science, the ripe insight of modern 
 psychology, can stay this logic of personal revelation by 
 striking at the premise. But in the age of Mahomet it 
 was the spontaneous movement of society, the inward 
 necessity of reason and faith. He could not escape the 
 resort to prescriptive legislation nor to the sword of the 
 flesh. Wherever he carried his theological dogma and 
 his religious faith, he must plant the State which it im- 
 plied. If he had not obeyed the implication, he would 
 simply have left the fulfilment to his successors. Hence 
 the shallowness of the charge that he became an impostor 
 when he resorted to the sword. A highly spiritual nature 
 might resist all temptation to other than spiritual weapons 
 to enforce the divine command ; but a practical worker 
 must confront the rebellious facts. 
 
 The social and political status was more than oppor- 
 tunity: it absolutely prescribed his way. The crossed 
 swords of Rome and Persia were sinking from exhausted 
 hands, when the flash of his keen scimitar smote them 
 apart. To his Arab hosts, as they rose from the dust of 
 the trampled battle-field of nations to hurl both empires 
 under their feet, he cried, " We have made you a central 
 people, that ye may bear witness to mankind." ^ They 
 had already learned by trading and predatory relations 
 the weakness of these unwieldy giants ; and the contagion 
 of such colossal rivalries stimulated their passion for uni- 
 versal empire.2 This Arab raid was no sudden impulse. 
 The curious reader will find in the vivid pages of Tabari 
 
 ■ Koran, ii. 137. 2 Finlay : Greece under the Romans, p. 444. 
 
534 ISLAM. 
 
 the stirring story of border wars waged for ages by these 
 indomitable tribes against the overshadowing monarchies 
 on either side, of their continued part in the vast mihtary 
 expeditions sweeping back and forth across northern 
 Arabia, and their alternating emotions as one or the other 
 side proved victorious for the hour. They saw these 
 mercenary hosts despoiling themselves and each other of 
 unity, discipline, faith in leadership and destiny; dissolv- 
 ing under the treachery and neglect of corrupt courts. 
 Their habits of raiding had familiarized them for centuries 
 with the immense treasures gathered by Aryan and Turk in 
 the great cities of Irak and Central Asia.' And when these 
 capitals were no longer capable of defence against the 
 cupidity of the strongest, their desert hunger hardly needed 
 the warrant of religious conmiand to become irresistible. 
 When the Prophet's announcement of a common law and 
 right broke down the feuds of generations, it was not 
 strange that they swept to the magnificent quarry from 
 Bagdad to Balkh. It was no recent account that they were 
 invited to settle with the Sassanian kings. It reached 
 back through the long history of their own ancestral States 
 of Ghazzan and Hira in Irak, of their immemorial pos- 
 session of Damascus and Holwan, and the head-waters of 
 the traditional Gan-Eden of their race. From the time of 
 the Seleucidae they had raided in northern Persia; and 
 their expulsion by Ardeshir and then by Shapur, when he 
 ravaged Arabia to the gates of Medina, and subjected it 
 down to the shores of Yemen on the Southern Sea, was 
 rankling in the poetic traditions of every tribe.^ 
 
 Under such stimulation a whirl of discordant clans 
 sprang at the call of revelation into instant nationality ; 
 an individualism unmatched in history was exalted into 
 
 1 Wright: Christianity in Arabia, jip. 21, 25. For account of early Turkish conquests 
 in Iran, see Vambery, History of Bokhara. 
 
 * Wright : Christianity ift A rabia, pp. 63, 69. 
 
MAHOMET. 535 
 
 typical universality, in the world-mastering individuality 
 of its God. In Allah was manifest to them the secret 
 bond of their common past, — the identity of all Semitic 
 revelations by Abraham, Moses, Jesus, — but in its last and 
 highest form. It is true that this inspiration of nationality 
 was initiatory only. Islam, like every other great religion, 
 has used its birthplace only as the leverage of a moment; 
 and the loyalty of the tribes to a common master was a 
 transient, almost a vanishing, element in its magnificent 
 success. The achievement of Mahomet was neither by 
 local nor physical forces. Arabia was fit only to give birth 
 to the faith, to nurse the Prophet; not to establish, nor even 
 to observe, his law.^ On the death of Mahomet it rose in 
 general revolt, and Abu Bekr, through Omar, had to wage 
 an exterminating war to protect the faith. Probably no 
 Mussulman country has been so little influenced by his 
 prescriptions. It was wholly unsuited to the Koranic legis- 
 lation, both by physical conditions and traditional habits 
 of life. It adhered to its older Sabean superstitions, to 
 its intense individualism, to its jealousy of human control. 
 In fact, the very exodus to world-conquest was almost as 
 much an expulsion of Islam from its native soil as it was 
 a product of that soil, and singularly lacked every sign of 
 patriotic emotion. But no sooner did its trumpet sound 
 the blast of Allah's judgment on the gods of the nations, 
 than every political element was found to be awaiting it, 
 and turned to the Prophet's grasp. The great empires 
 were distracted by barbarian invasions from without, and 
 by inward dissensions so hopeless that even heretical sects 
 could only tear each other like hungry wolves.^ In Spain, 
 ecclesiastical and civil strife invited the Saracen from Af- 
 rica, and gave Tarik a Gothic kingdom in five days of war. 
 Buddhism had no capacity to found a State ; but it had 
 taught the rude Mongols and Turks of Central Asia a cer- 
 
 i Buscli. Ur-wc/t, \.\. 8S, 89. 2 Gibbon, xlvi. xlvii. (Milman). 
 
536 ISLAM. 
 
 tain universality of faith and aim; and they hastened to 
 supply its defects of constructive resources by the new 
 religion of absolute monarchy and unlimited conquest. It 
 was a swift and easy evolution from a Shaman Genghis to 
 a Moslem Tamerlane. 
 
 Such being the historical necessities, it is not strange 
 that a single generation did not pass, before the creed of 
 the camel-driver of Mecca had mastered the thrones of the 
 East; or that a single century bore it in triumph from the 
 borders of China to the coast of Spain. The rapid growth 
 of Christianity is still widely believed to be the evidence of 
 its supernatural origin ; and Gibbon's splendid demonstra- 
 tion of the adequacy of natural conditions, and not very 
 ideal ones, to explain that process, was sufficient in its own 
 substance, apart from its irritating indirectness of tone, to 
 earn for the great scholar the name of infidel. But by 
 the old logic, so completely refuted then and since, the 
 far superior rate of Mahometan conquest would prove 
 Mahomet's claim to miraculous aid more valid than that 
 of Christ. In fact, both movements illustrate the same 
 law of continuity in historic cause and effect. Only in the 
 later religion the argument against substituting a supposed 
 need of Divine interference for this continuous force of 
 development becomes still more forcible. 
 
 We cannot fail to be reminded that tbe work of what 
 supernaturalism contemns as "unaided human reason" is 
 infinitely more marvellous than any effects which ignorance 
 and fear have ascribed to miraculous power. Not the least 
 of its achievements is the refutation of all claims to origi- 
 nal revelation ; the revealer himself being proved by its 
 historical investigations to have contributed but an atom 
 to the great reconstruction which his name represents, in 
 comparison with the vast contemporaneous forces, spiritual 
 and physical, centring in him. His contribution, equally 
 dependent on these conditions with all the other phe- 
 
MAHOMET. 537 
 
 nomena of the movement, consists mainly in the attach- 
 ment oi it to a personal claim, an imaginary oiificial func- 
 tion, a temporary centrality, which is but a higher crest 
 on the ever-changing oceanic wave. Herein is no dero- 
 gation to his moral or spiritual greatness, which has its 
 power over the course of history ; but limits are set, and 
 the law of its production is the same as that of every other 
 spiritual force, inseparable from the whole human process, 
 
 — just as the noblest tree is not the creation of a deific 
 stroke, but the product of a mere seed, and a slow integra- 
 tion of every elemental force through cosmic law. And 
 if he is surely merged at last, to impartial vision, in the 
 great human demands and currents which produced his 
 faith, is it not the height of illusion to merge the faith 
 itself and its whole historic destiny in him? 
 
 No personal biography, and no study of the supposed 
 beginnings of any positive religion, can ever fix the genesis 
 of a moral principle or spiritual ideal. As well believe 
 that God kneaded an Adam out of dust on some given 
 morning, as that Moses, or Buddha, or Jesus, or Mahomet, 
 brought a new revelation of truth or duty directly from 
 His hand. No speech, nor writing, nor wonderful work, 
 can teach men anything that was not already seeking 
 expression in their minds and consciences, and shaping 
 itself from their own resources into the very word they 
 deem God's message, — the very Life that wins their love 
 and awe. Mahomet's expectation to make the world the 
 kingdom of his God, the promise and the pov.'er of his in- 
 spiration to plant it above all the fallen thrones of the earth, 
 were aided and in no slight degree created by the push of 
 the living humanity to which he appealed. This was the 
 secret of his victory, the legitimate and inevitable next step, 
 
 — a piece of nature and necessity. When the world scorns 
 and crucifies a prophet's message, he sees the deeper soul 
 within the world, that confesses the truth and contradicts 
 
538 ISLAM, 
 
 the crime. The facts may refute him ; but the deeper 
 fact is the instinct of his genius that cannot be deceived. 
 The age that bore him bids him be of cheer : It is for me 
 you are made; you are my purpose; you only are indis- 
 pensable to me. More explicable to the thoughtful student 
 than to himself is the conqueror's mood. When the actual 
 voice of his time is gathered up for him, naturally enough, 
 into the command of an omnipotent Will, could there be 
 room for any issue but intensest conviction and its con- 
 quest of the world? To the depression of the conquered 
 Jew, the Roman world offered no gleam of religious light, 
 no refuge but an ideal kingdom of God. Hence the quiet- 
 ism of Jesus, looking to the destruction of existing things 
 and a new creation beyond. But to the desert-exaltations 
 of the free Arab, the kingdoms of the world, rent and falling 
 asunder, were themselves seed-ground waiting for the new 
 creation at his hand. Hence the plunge of his soul into 
 instant civil and political construction, with such weapons, 
 such policies, such prescriptive autocracy as it involved. 
 
 These general facts and principles may serve to intro- 
 duce our study of that extraordinary personage with whose 
 name and religion the history of Iran has been identified 
 for. the last thousand years. 
 
 Mahomet's system and summons contained nothing 
 essentially original, or even unfamiliar to his countrymen. 
 His very idea of a prophet — as not merely a messenger 
 from God, but as intrusted with His written message — 
 was simply a traditional belief of the whole Semitic race. 
 It is true that his names for function and for book were 
 probably imported by him out of Hebrew into Arabic ; ^ 
 and it was the common opinion of the tribes in his time 
 that no great prophet had ever been born upon their soil.^ 
 Yet that Arabia was soon to have her turn, was a current 
 expectation among her numerous reformers and seekers 
 
 1 Kremer: Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam, p. 225. ' ilasudi, chap. vi. 
 
MAHOMET. 539 
 
 for new light. In that generation there were many eyes 
 open to the Hebrew and Christian masters, and to the 
 rehgious needs of their own land.^ The vague sense of 
 sohtary omnipotent Will haunted that desert atmosphere. 
 In Mahomet it did but grow to a palpable distinctness, an 
 instant intimacy and command. 
 
 The iinity of God was a golden ore embedded in Arabian 
 memory and faith. Mahomet learned to track it through 
 manifold ancestral veins ; and it seemed that wherever he 
 struck the soil, its fires of judgment and mercy sprang 
 forth to tell their tale. Long before his day the pilgrims 
 to Mecca were wont to pray to Allah, in every real emer- 
 gency, as the one all-sufficient help.^ There was a high- 
 est sheikh among troops of lower gods.^ Of these there 
 were at least three hundred and sixty whose images stood 
 around the Kaaba, — of all shapes, animal, vegetable, min- 
 eral ; and many more within it, — among them Abraham, 
 Jesus, and even Mary his mother.^ Of an impassive and 
 sceptical temper in matters of worship, the Arabs had evi- 
 dently reached a broad indifference to special names and 
 forms. Yet Mahomet rightly assumed that these were 
 secondary in the popular conscience, as well as in the 
 belief of the Koreish tribe, the temple guardians ; and 
 so held these men guilty in not immediately casting them 
 down before the new call to spiritual worship. What other 
 gospel did he offer them than that which Adam, Noah, 
 Abraham, Moses, Jesus, as well as their own prophets of 
 warning, had received from the Eternal? We have no 
 sure means of testing the truth of the traditions from 
 which Mahomet derived his largely legendary stories of 
 the sins and penalties of early Arab tribes. We have no 
 accounts of Arabia, deserving any credit, earlier than four 
 
 1 Ibn-Khalilun. Caussin de Perceval: Essai sur V Hist, des Arabes, i. :^22. 
 
 * Deutsch : Islam, p. 3J. ^ Sprenger : Das Leben d. Alohammad, i. 15. 
 
 * Caussin, i. 17s, 198. 
 
540 ISLAM. 
 
 or five centuries before Christ, and then only for the 
 Himyaritic kings of the South ; while the Koreish, Ma- 
 homet's own tribe, appears distinctly only just before the 
 Christian era. But from the oldest times known, worship- 
 pers of a Supreme God had mingled on the soil ; tribes 
 had been forcibly converted to Judaism ; the Talmud 
 itself was to no small extent Arabian in its associations 
 and contents.^ It has been lately maintained by archae- 
 ologists that the ancient worship of Saturn was first trans- 
 formed on this soil into that of Abraham, and so became 
 the root of Hebrew monotheism.^ This theory is at least 
 quite as probable as that of a recent historian, who, on the 
 strength of Bible genealogies, traces all monotheistic ten- 
 dencies in the Arabs to a primitive revelation by Abraham, 
 of which we have no account outside of the Bible, and no 
 hint save in a few Koranic legends.^ Better foundation 
 may exist for the story of the introduction of idolatry into 
 Yemen in the third century, and of its expulsion soon 
 afterwards by Jewish influence. The dethronement of a 
 king of that country by Rome and Abyssinia for his per- 
 secution of Christianity, in the sixth century, is a matter of 
 history.^ All these facts indicate little for a purely mono- 
 theistic religion. The Semitism of Arabia probably fol- 
 lowed a course of development similar to that of the 
 Hebrews, never reaching the pure idea of Divine Unity 
 till its latest phases. These, however, had certainly ap- 
 peared before the birth of Mahomet, in a class of reform- 
 ers of whom I shall speak in a moment. 
 
 It is certain that Mosaism and Christianity were familiar 
 
 to the Arabs through their unhealthy offshoots throughout 
 
 whole districts of the peninsula, and through ancient settle- 
 
 \ ments, the caravan trade with Syria, and the incessant mi- 
 
 1 Deutsch : Islam, p. 34. - Braun : Gemdlde der Molianait. Welt. 
 
 ' Muir : Introduction to Life 0/ Mahomet, cxvi. cxxvii. 
 
 * Caussin de Perceval, i. 90-94. Abiilfeda, p. 137. Tabari: History of Sassanianisjn 
 (Noldeke), p. i/S-xSs- Muir: Introduction to Life qf Mahomet, chap. iii. 
 
MAHOMET. 541 
 
 gration of tribes. They were even in possession of courts 
 and States. There was a Christian bishopric in Himyar 
 in the age of Constantius ; ^ and whole tribes were prob- 
 ably of Jewish origin. North and south of the keen 
 traders' path across the desert, in Syria and in Egypt, 
 Monophysite, Nestorian, and orthodox were waging their 
 internecine wars about the unity of God and of Christ. 
 Even where the two older forms of monotheism had made 
 little impression, the local and tribal gods were losing 
 their hold. Sharastani, in his " Book of Religious Sects," 
 clearly describes the religious consciousness of the tribes. 
 Some denied a creator and a resurrection, and taught 
 that everything was born and died by Nature's force ; 
 others recognized a Creator, but denied resurrection; 
 others worshipped idols. Some inclined to Judaism, some 
 to Christianity, some to Sabeanism, directing their affairs 
 by planetary influences. Some honored angels, some de- 
 mons.^ Mahomet's first sympathetic relations were with 
 Jewish and Christian believers, among whom he naturally 
 found readiest refuge and encouragement.^ But this was 
 of short duration. He owed more, in the sequel, to the 
 prevailing decay of faith in the old polytheism, and to 
 the semi-rationalistic expectations of a higher positive 
 motive and a more consistent law. He can hardly be 
 said to have derived his inspiration from the Bible, how- 
 ever much his style may resemble now Jeremiah's and now 
 that of Jesus. It has the authoritative, yet sympathetic 
 and yearning tone of Semitic prophecy everywhere. His 
 knowledge of the Old and New Testaments was apparently 
 at second or third hand, and worked over in the heats of 
 his own intense conflict. The little volume of Sir W. Muir, 
 entitled " Islam," in which he attempts to prove an intimate 
 
 1 Asseman (Biblioth. Orient., iii.)- Wright's Arabia, p. 35. 
 
 2 Abulfeda : History of Ante-Islaviism (Lat. Fleischer), bk. vi. p. iSi. 
 
 * Sura vi. 85. Sprenger : Das Leben d. Mohammad, ii. 153-180 (from Ibn Ishak). 
 
542 ISLAM. 
 
 acquaintance with these older Scriptures by Koranic refer- 
 ences and quotations, is a very curious specimen of special 
 pleading, and amounts to nothing more than this, — that 
 Mahomet constantly charged his countrymen with the 
 knowledge of earlier revelations in writings, which had 
 testified of him to the Jew and the Christian, and which 
 had been twisted from their meaning, and had lost their 
 saving power. But with all his acquaintance with the gen- 
 eral outline of the Pentateuch, there is only one passage in 
 the Koran that agrees verbatim with one in the old Bible. 
 It is extremely doubtful whether he ever saw a copy of 
 either Testament.^ Charges of perversion, made against 
 him, are of the vaguest kind, and mere denunciations of the 
 crime in general terms. The only definite instance^ of it 
 sufficiently proves his ignorance ; and his allusions to divine 
 judgments on disobedient tribes in old time show his habit 
 of freely filling up the pages of his unknown Scriptures 
 with national traditions or tales derived from other sources, 
 — Talmudic, or Jewish Christian, — with no other warrant 
 than their fitness to serve his inspired purpose.^ 
 
 The supreme necessity of man's obedience to the provi- 
 dential Will made the whole world its parable. So the 
 " illiterate " Prophet flamed with exhaustless type and 
 symbol out of a past of which his knowledge seems in- 
 comprehensible. To one who held the secret key, that 
 " God only knows the numbers and the times," there could 
 
 ^ See especially Sura vii. xii. xx. 1 14-120; xxi. 105 ; liii. 39. 
 
 - In Sura Ixv. 6, where, in allusion to the promise of a Paraclete in John, xvi. 7, he mis- 
 takes the word, wTongly spelt, for the corresponding word in Arabic {Ahmed), and insists on 
 its having been so written in the original text, as a prophetic reference to himself. See Rod- 
 weirs Koran. 
 
 ^ Witness especially the stories of Moses's journey with a mysterious angel, whose mission 
 is to rebuke his impatience by apparent crimes, shown afterwards to be Providential blessings 
 (xviii., compare Parnell's Hermit) ; of Abraham rebuking his father for idolatry (xix. 45) ; of 
 the warning given to Adam against Iblis, and of God's relenting towards him after his fall, so 
 taking off the primal curse (xx. 1 17-120) ; of Samariy, who tempted the Israelites to wor- 
 ship a calf (xx. 90). We may add the beautiful tale of Abraham's conversion from idolatry 
 of the elements (vi. 74-79), and that of Mary's deliverance of her child under a palm of the 
 desert (xix.). 
 
MAHOMET. 543 
 
 be no difference of legends sacred and profane. His Scrip- 
 tures welcomed the secular myths of the Seven Sleepers, 
 the Queen of Sheba, the search of Dhul'karnain for the 
 fountain of life in mythic darkness, and the building of the 
 wall against Gog and Magog. 
 
 We cannot suppose an acquaintance with the Christian 
 books in one who makes the Gospel promise rewards to 
 those who fight and slay in its defence, and who mistakes 
 Mary the mother of Jesus for Miriam the " sister of 
 Aaron." ^ No Arabic version of the Bible existed in his 
 time, and he could read no other language than his own. 
 What he may have heard from his Jewish companions at 
 Medina concerning the Hebrew writings, especially as he 
 quotes sentences from great Rabbins v/ho had visited the 
 schools of their countrymen in Arabia, it is not now pos- 
 sible to say .2 
 
 Of his supposed teachers, the monk Sergius and the 
 semi-Christian Jew Waraka, to the former of whom Dean 
 Stanley ascribes his knowledge of Christian truth, we may 
 be said on the whole to know nothing.^ It would be as 
 well for Christianity not to make it responsible for the apoc- 
 ryphal stories related of Jesus in the Koran.^ Mahomet's 
 continuity was not so much with Christianity as with post- 
 Christian Judaism. " When the Talmud was completed," 
 says the best Jewish authority on the subject, " the Koran 
 was begun. Post hoc, propter hoc. . . . The Hebrew, the 
 Greek, the Aramaic phases of monotheism, the Old Testa- 
 ment, the New Testament, the Targum and the Talmud, 
 were each in their sphere fulfilling their behests. The 
 
 1 Siira xix. 2g. 
 
 2 Deutsch : Islam, p. 35. Sprenger thinks a very limited literature, in part apocryphal, 
 in the Arabic language, but in Hebrew letters, existed in Arabia before Mahomet. His 
 proofs of this opinion are very slight. But he shows that it was after the exile to Medina and 
 his connection with the Jews at that city, that the prophet's revelations have most to say of 
 the Bible story. — Sprenger : Das Lehen d. Moh. ii. 285. 
 
 ^ Stanley : History of the Eastern Church, p. 366. 
 * See Sprenger : Das Leben d. Mohammad, i. 124. 
 
544 ISLAM. 
 
 times were ripe for the Arabic phase." ^ Sprenger's con- 
 jectures — that the connecting point between Jewish and 
 Arab monotheism is to be found in Essenic and Nazarean 
 settlements scattered over the northern or Nabathcan des- 
 erts, that the old Arabian sage and poet Lokman was no 
 other than the Jewish sectary Elxai, and that Islam itself 
 sprang from certain free-thinking Essenes who had lost 
 the knowledge of the Bible — have little special proof to 
 recommend them. 
 
 But Mahomet was preceded by a line of native poets 
 who more or less forcibly proclaimed Allah as above all 
 gods ; by voices in the wilderness announcing the ap- 
 proach of a fresh revelation of his will ; and by a class 
 of strict Unitarians, who hovered between Judaism, Chris- 
 tianity, and a sceptical rationalism very natural to the 
 Arab mind. These Hanifs (or " converted ") were Ma- 
 homet's forerunners, his teachers, his intimates, some of 
 them his rivals, even his foes.- This name, as signifying 
 one who had lost the true faith and fallen to heathen- 
 ism, was applied to them by the Jews, who did not like 
 being held responsible for their free-thinking, and dreaded 
 their criticism on themselves. The Hanifs claimed to re- 
 vive the old creed of Abraham, and called themselves 
 Sabeans.3 Perhaps the fine legend of Abraham's conver- 
 sion from star and sun worship, mentioned above, told in 
 the sixth Sura, was derived from them. More than one 
 of them had shaken off the dust of the Kaaba, and sought 
 the primitive law of Abraham and its less idolatrous 
 shrines.* There are records of Mahomet's personal ac- 
 quaintance with twelve of them before his assumption of 
 the prophetic call.^ Islam is generous in its recognition 
 of his indebtedness to other men. It has remembered 
 
 1 Deutsch: Islam, p. lo. Sprenger : Das Lebeti d. Mohammad, i. 35, 43, 93. 
 
 * Palmer's translation. ^ Deutsch : Islam, p. 38. 
 
 * Sprenger, i. no, 118. ^ Rodwell's Koran, Preface, xvi. 
 
MAHOMET. 545 
 
 a cry of Zeyd to the All-merciful for forgiveness, as one 
 who had been beguiled by idol-worship, and having found 
 it was but a spectre of the night, rejoiced to see clearly 
 and to feel his withered boughs revive. He had even 
 summoned the Koreish to accept Islam before the Prophet 
 himself had spoken.^ He had anticipated the Koran in 
 denouncing the sacrificial feasts of the temple and the 
 savage rite of burying children alive; had drawn out the 
 victims with his own hands and restored them to their 
 parents.^ He was not satisfied with Judaism or with 
 Christianity. Omeyyah even claimed to be the coming 
 deliverer, and at first refused to recognize the master. 
 These were men after Mahomet's own heart, and he be- 
 gins by making himself one of them. He is ready to 
 believe of two, at least, that they are destined to create 
 churches of their own in heaven. To the whole line of 
 old believers, of whom they were the representatives in 
 his day, he accords the name of Moslem.^ He puts him- 
 self on their ground of radical free-thought, saying that 
 " Abraham was neither Jew nor Christian, but a pure 
 Hanif, who did not add gods to God." ^ The chronicles 
 indeed claim for him a long and noble spiritual descent. 
 El Masudi'^ has a full chapter (much of it legendary, doubt- 
 less) on the confessors of the true God between Christ and 
 Mahomet, martyrs and saints and heroes. He tells of 
 Khaled, who smote the altars of fire-worship, and whose 
 daughter, hearing Mahomet preach that " the Eternal only 
 is God;" said, " Those are my father's own words ; " of 
 Asad, Abu Karib, who believed in the prophet seven cen- 
 turies before his coming; of Koss, on whom Mahomet 
 prayed for the blessing of God's bounty; of Omeyyah, 
 whose strange power compelled the Koreish themselves 
 
 ^ Sprenger, i. 42. 
 
 * Sprenger, i. no, it6. Deutsch, p. 39. Braun, p. 13. 
 
 ' Sprenger, i. 71. * Sura iii. 60. 
 
 6 Meadows 0/ Gold, chap. vi. 
 
 35 
 
546 ISLAM. 
 
 to put the words, " In the name of God," at the beginning 
 of all their writings. 
 
 The ancient " Rolls " to which Mahomet often refers 
 were probably the so-called "Rolls of Moses," claimed to 
 be in possession of the Hanifs, and to have been given to 
 primeval prophets, to the number of a hundred Suras, in 
 letters of crimson like sunbeams, on green tablets, as the 
 later Moslems affirm. It has been strongly doubted whether 
 they were much earlier than his own time.^ They are 
 quoted in the five verses of his eighty-seventh Sura, and 
 perhaps referred to in the pure monotheism of the fifty- 
 third.^ Here he may have found those stories of old- 
 time tribes destroyed for their sins, which may have been 
 founded on early wars and migrations, but arc explicable 
 enough among the desert ruins of the old cities of Had- 
 ramaut. Although Mahomet afterwards rejected these 
 Hanifite " Rolls," as he did the Jews and Christians of his 
 day, he must have drawn on some such records for much 
 of his material in enforcing the universality of Allah's 
 dealing with men. 
 
 In this time of dissatisfaction with the current forms of 
 faith, it was natural that the sceptical Arab mind should 
 have little respect for the multiplied images of the Kaaba, 
 which had too evidently become merely profitable in- 
 vestments for families who had long been their official 
 curators. Doubtless still retaining certain social uses for 
 the town-people, these dead stones could have little mean- 
 ing for the free Bedouins, the independent tribes, the 
 poetic, passionate individualists of the desert, except so 
 far as they still recalled the primitive fetichism of litholatry, 
 of which the legend of Jacob's pillow was a theistic out- 
 growth. They could surely better appreciate the Prophet's 
 taunts than the perquisites of the Koreish officials. 
 
 Of the reaction now described, Mahomet's intense mono- 
 
 * Sprenger, i. 57. ''■ Rodwell, p. 27. 
 
MAHOMET, 547 
 
 theism was a natural product. He dwells especially on 
 the wrangling of religious sects, each utterly forgetful of 
 the one God above them all. What a spectacle were the 
 hates of Jew and Christian, the savage wars of Nestorian 
 and Monophysite ! 
 
 " To Jesus and other apostles we gave manifest signs ; and if God 
 had pleased, their followers would not have fallen into these disputes. 
 But God doeth what He will ! " ^ " Mankind was but one people, and 
 God sent them prophets of warning and glad tidings, and the Book of 
 Truth to settle all disputes. Yet none disputed Hke those to whom 
 the Book had been sent ; for they were filled with jealousy of each 
 other." - " O people of the Book, why wrangle about Abraham ? 
 Why contend about that whereof ye know nothing ? " ^ 
 
 His reproaches show that he sought only to recall his 
 people to the service of One whom they already knew. 
 He pretended to no message from an unheard-of Power 
 or Name, but chose the highest god of the existing faith, 
 specially associated with those benevolent uses to which a 
 portion of the religious offerings were devoted,* — the god 
 whose name was kindred with the old Semitic El, who was 
 more widely recognized than any other tribal god, and 
 probably the only one of whom no image had ever been 
 made. At the opening of every Sura of the Koran stands 
 the same invocation : " In the name of Allah, the Merciful, 
 the Just." 
 
 Nor were the doctrines with which this name was now 
 invested originated by Mahomet. His eschatology was 
 Talmudic and Parsi ; his angelology, the legacy of the 
 desert. His Satan was Christian, the natural foil to an 
 equally intense personification of good. His Jesus, though 
 tinged with the Gnostic and Docetic conceptions which 
 had come to be very widely mingled with Christian doc- 
 trine, was, after all, just a messenger of God after the old 
 
 1 Sura ii. 254- - Sura ii. 209. ^ Sura iii. 59. 
 
 * Palmer's translation of Introduction, p. xii. Koran, Sura vi. 137. 
 
548 ISLAM. 
 
 Semitic pattern, made like other men, — for "■ it beseemeth 
 not God to beget a Son." ^ His system of prayers, alms, 
 fasts, pilgrimages, was borrowed from existing customs; 
 the strange barbaric rites and forms go back to old Sabean 
 planetary worship ; the three daily devotions and' turning 
 to Jerusalem were Christian.^ Abulfeda enumerates all of 
 them as practised among the Arabs traditionally, and as 
 sanctioned by the prophet.^ But Allah must give new in- 
 terpretation to the whole. " Eat," said he, " of what has 
 been sanctified by the Holy Name." * So the early Chris- 
 tians avoided meat that had been offered to idols. It was 
 in what entered into the mouth that the Semite had always 
 found his broadest symbol of defilement or of purity. Ma- 
 homet kept to these old instincts of his race. He refused 
 afterwards to make a Kebla of a Jewish city ; but he sub- 
 stituted Mecca, a nearer and more familiar shrine. 
 
 His morality, the constant fuel of his fiery zeal, was that 
 of all good men in his day. He ascribed it wholly to the 
 older prophets, and enforced it in their name. " Verily 
 Abraham and Jacob and the tribes have passed away; 
 they have the reward of their deeds ; of these you shall 
 not be questioned, only of your own." ^ " Every soul 
 shall bear the good and the evil for which it has labored ; 
 and God will burden none beyond its power." ^ Yet the 
 deeds required are the same. 
 
 " Worship God alone ; be kind to kindred and servants, orphans 
 and the poor ; speak righteously to men, pray, and pay alms." " Grum- 
 ble not at your parents ; with humility and tenderness say, O Lord, be 
 merciful to them, even as they brought me up when I was helpless." 
 " Abandon the old barbarities, blood-vengeance and child-murder, and 
 be united as one flesh ; " yet, " let punishment for bloodshed be eye for 
 eye." " Do thy alms openly or in secret ; for both are well." " Give of 
 that which hath been given you, before the day cometh when there shall 
 
 ' Sura xix. 36. 
 
 2 Sura ii. 192-1,16. Caussin de Perceval : Essai sur VHist. des Arabes, i. 113, 19S, 203, 
 269. Sprenger, i. 78. 
 
 * Abulfeda, p. iSi. * Sura vi. iiS. ^ Sura ii. 135. ^ gura ii. 286. 
 
MAHOMET. 549 
 
 be no trafficking, nor friendship, nor intercession." " Wouldst thou 
 be taught the steep (path) ? It is to ransom the captive, to feed the 
 hungry, the kindred, the orphan, and him whose mouth is in the dust. 
 Be of those who enjoin steadfastness and compassion on others." 
 " Woe to them that make show of piety, and refuse help to the needy." 
 " Make not your ahns void by reproaches or injury." " Forgiveness 
 and kind speech are better than favors with annoyance." "Aban- 
 don usury." " He who spendeth his substance to be seen of men, is 
 like a rock with thin soil over it, whereon the rain falletli and leaveth 
 it hard. But they who expend their substance to please God and 
 establish their souls, are like a garden on a hill, on which the rain 
 falleth and it yieldeth its fruits twofold ; and even if the rain doth not 
 fall, yet is there a dew." 
 
 " Stand fast to justice, bearing witness before God, — whether it be 
 against yourselves, or your parents, or kindred, whether the party be 
 rich or poor. God is nearer than either. Therefore follow not passion, 
 lest you swerve from truth." " Covet not another's gifts from God." 
 " There is no piety in turning the face east or west, but in believing 
 in God only and doing good." " Make the best of all things ; enjoin 
 justice and avoid the foolish ; and if Satan stir thee to evil, take refuge 
 in God." 
 
 " The birth of a daughter brings dark shadows on a man's face." 
 "But to slay your children, even for fear of want, is a great wicked- 
 ness. For them and you we will provide." " God hath given you 
 wives that ye may put love and tenderness between you." " Divorce 
 is allowed twice ; on conditions, a third time and no more ; but let 
 wives be kept honorably, or put away with kindness." [The Koranic 
 laws concerning treatment of women in divorce are of better humanity 
 and regard for justice than those of any other Scriptures.] " Rever- 
 ence the wombs that bare you." " Adultery is foul." " Let the be- 
 liever restrain his e3'es from lust ; let women make no display of 
 ornaments, save to their own kindred." 
 
 " Know ye that this world's life is a cheat ; the inultiplying of riches 
 and children is like the plants that spring up after rain, rejoicing the 
 husbandman, then turn yellow and wither away. In the next life is 
 severe chastisement, or else pardon from God and His peace " ^ 
 
 These sentences are introduced in detail to show how 
 entirely the moral ideal of the new gospel was set in the 
 
 I Sura ii. 77 ; xvii. 24, 25 ; ii. 173, 255, 275 ; xc. 12 ; cvii. 4-6; ii. 265-67, 279 ; iv. 133,134; 
 ii. 173 ; vii. 19S, 199; xvi. 60; xvii. 33 ; xxx. 20; ii. 229-231 ; Ixv. ; xvii. 34; xxiv. 31 ; Ivii. 
 tg, 20. 
 
550 ISLAM. 
 
 common-sense of duty and the familiar instincts of love. 
 In the general tone, they might have been the warnings of 
 Isaiah or Joel, or the tender appeals of Jesus. The mes- 
 sage of the prophet to practical conduct is the same in all 
 times when prophets are possible. There is a difference 
 in the extent to which legislation is mingled w'ith the pro- 
 phetic function, naturally to the detriment of the ideal 
 freedom and breadth of the latter; yet sometimes, as in 
 Mahomet's case, it serves to prove a practical energy and 
 helpfulness in meeting the stern practical limits to its social 
 working, which " inspiration" is wont to ignore. Mahomet 
 did not at first incline to this administrative function, and it 
 was only developed by the necessities of those with whom 
 he had to deal. His special dealings with rites and cus- 
 toms were always ameliorative, yet in ways of which the 
 past afforded him at least the suggestion. Those relating 
 to women sprang naturally out of many elements of equal- 
 ity and chivalrous respect for her sex, as to the choice of a 
 husband, and the estimate of chastity, in old Arabian life.^ 
 Thus polygamy was regulated and limited in the Koran, 
 though it could not be abolished ; and slavery was fast 
 bound to every kindly instinct evolved by the patriarchal 
 household, though it must still stand in Islam and else- 
 where for a thousand years. 
 
 The darker features of these ethics, their retaliatory and 
 penal precepts, w^ere also out of the past. Mahomet in- 
 vented none of them. They were the necessities of obe- 
 dience to a supreme personal Will in the theological ideal, 
 or of emergencies which made war in its behalf a matter 
 not of self-defence only, but of familiar duty and desire. 
 His ethical sanctions are similar to those of other Semitic 
 teachers, — appealing, though not exclusively, to the fear 
 of direct judgment by Almighty Will, or to the hope of 
 definite rewards ; and to the imagination plunged, as with 
 
 * Hellwald: Culturgesch. pp. 471, 472. 
 
MAHOMET. - 551 
 
 the Hebrew, in a sea of physical symbolism, where every 
 actual and familiar fact finds an ideal significance, but 
 directed mainly to that invisible future existence for which 
 the Hebrew had little sense. This imagery of actual life, 
 though necessarily sensuous, is not sensual, but controlled, 
 and even transfigured, by moral and spiritual purpose. 
 It is a gross error, as we shall hereafter see, to charge Ma- 
 homet's success to the use of sensual appeals. The ha- 
 rems of Paradise know " no vain discourse, no charge of sin, 
 but only the cry, ' Peace, Peace ; ' beauty that shrinks from 
 tempting, and wine that hurts not the sense ; " ^ while the 
 poisonous fruits and boiling drinks of hell are the bitterness 
 of remembered sin. All this ethical meaning of reward 
 and penalty is rooted only in sovereign decrees, — "a grasp 
 of the Lord's hand " to guide or to mislead. The very 
 difference between right and wrong, not less than the con- 
 sequences of conduct, is an immediate product of His will. 
 " The blessed shall abide in heaven forever, with whatever 
 imperishable boon He may please to add ; and the wicked 
 shall abide in their place also while heaven and earth last, 
 unless He shall otJiei'wise will; for verily He doeth as He 
 doth choose." 2 So absolute is this worship of the personal 
 Will, that in spite of moral predestination an unbeliever is 
 held as the chief of sinners, — as one who must have vol- 
 untarily rejected the truth. It is true that, like Dante and 
 Swedenborg, he hesitated at no serviceable outward image 
 of invisible realities, and relentlessly piled their terrors 
 upon h's foes. His argument for immortality rests on the 
 same Semitic premise, — because God wills it. He can 
 raise man to a " new creation " after death, — the old 
 a fortiori proof of Paul and early Christianity. " Cannot 
 He who first created you restore you even from bones 
 and rubbish?" Of whatever importance it might be to 
 
 ^ Sura Ivi. 19, 24, 25. 
 
 ' Sura Ixix. 26-34 ; Ivi. 40-50; xxxvi. 65 ; vi. 130 ; xi. log, no. 
 
552 ISLAM. 
 
 prove a future life in order to enforce the incessant prom- 
 ises and warnings of his message, no evidence seems to 
 have been thought necessary beyond such appeals to an 
 arbitrary Omnipotence, and here and there an image from 
 natural analogy, — the spring, the reviving desert, the 
 morning after the night. There is no resort to the intui- 
 tions and yearnings of the soul, to its sense of unfinished 
 work and unused powers. The sum of all is, that God's 
 power to do what He wills involves His doing what we 
 desire and threatening what we fear. And the same pre- 
 mise has had the same effect in closing up the argument 
 for immortality wherever it has formed the basis of reli- 
 gious belief There was no need for Mahomet to present 
 any other; it was not in his Semitic nature, nor in his Arab 
 environment, that any other should even be suggested. 
 Yet the preference of the eternal to the transient is, after 
 all, here, as in all ethics and religion, the primal motive 
 to which the preacher appeals with power ; and the expe- 
 riences of the desert needed no argument to justify that 
 appeal. 
 
 Most significant in these ethical relations of Mahomet 
 to his times and their demands is the democratic tone of 
 his message. Could the voice of the religious idea in 
 its most awful simplicity, concentrating the confused frag- 
 ments of personal worship, the broken lights of mono- 
 theistic tendency in that world of wrangling creeds and 
 oppressive institutions, into the commanding exclusive- 
 ness, the supreme self-assertion, of Semitic deity, lord of 
 life and death, sword at once of spirit and of flesh, do 
 less than bring all heads to a level, all privilege to the 
 dust? " No religion," it has been well said, " is so com- 
 pletely the vox popidi as Islam." ^ Away with every 
 priest or sovereign who shall dare to make an idolater of 
 the simplest soul, or stand between him and that jealous 
 
 1 Sprenger, iii. 177. 
 
MAHOMET. 553 
 
 Will which could suffer no rival, and knew no distinction 
 in its dealings with men. Khosru Parviz, the Sassanian 
 monarch, had tried in vain to put down his nobles by hft- 
 ing up the poor. But here was One before whom king 
 and noble alike were vanity, throned in the conscience of 
 the least of their subjects, and taking up with unheard-of 
 inquisition the cause of the helpless and oppressed. It 
 seemed that in the tongue and sword of this Prophet 
 
 "God said, I am tired of kings, 
 I suffer them no more ; 
 Up to my ear the morning brings 
 The outrage of the poor." 
 
 It abolished privilege of sex in matters of religious func- 
 tion. It set aside primogeniture. It denounced usury, 
 and promised double return to the giver to the poor and 
 the wayfarer, in the love of God.^ It forbade claims to 
 absolute ownership of man. It levelled the warring creeds 
 and systems of Biblical authority in the name of One who 
 had taught mankind the use of the pen itself, — the pen, 
 greatest of levellers, giver of Bibles to men. By the pen 
 Mahomet swears ; by the pen records every man's doings ; 
 by the pen reveals their destiny at the last day. This dem- 
 ocratic thunder could not have rolled from east to west 
 and west to east over the world, as it did for a hundred 
 years, had not the atmosphere been charged, and waiting, 
 in all the nations. We have seen how it had been developed 
 in reactions from Sassanian disintegration, in the Manichaean 
 heresy, in Christian antipathies, and under the pressure of 
 Roman tyranny and Byzantine corruption ; while words 
 which had long been sacred were shorn of their traditional 
 authority and meaning. In Arabia we shall see the same 
 impulse in a more directly productive form. 
 
 Most decisive in the point of view before us was the 
 relation of Islam to the anthropomorphic conception of 
 
 1 Sura XXX. 37, 38. 
 
554 ISLAM. 
 
 deity then in possession of the world. In Christianity, 
 its logic had worked steadily downward ; adding in the 
 Trinity many new human relations, — personal, numerical, 
 relative, — and tending to the dissolution of Divine Abso- 
 luteness in a humanly organized ecclesiastical institution. 
 In Islam, anthropomorphic logic rose to its supreme ideal 
 truth in the total self-adequacy of personal Will, firmly 
 fixed as pure individuality, not to be violated by finite divi- 
 sion or human representation. No person or church could 
 possibly be in His express image; and even the prophet 
 who bore His message could never be other than a mere 
 man. Mahomet made no pretence of representing any 
 but simple human nature.^ It is evident that anthropo- 
 morphism, pushed to this conception of a pure self- 
 identity of the will, has reached its extreme limit, and 
 involves by way of compensation and reaction its corre- 
 lated idea and its opposite pole, — the pure dependence 
 of man on his own natural faculties for the pursuit and 
 reception of truth. What did the withdrawal of the super- 
 human into roiiotcst individuality have for the human but 
 a like self-sufficiency in its own impassable limits? Some 
 reliance there must be ; if not on God, — an arbitrary, inac- 
 cessible Will, — then on what else but the keener effort of the 
 human faculties to reach certainty of themselves? In this 
 way I should explain at once the rapid tendency to specu- 
 lation and scepticism in Mahometan history, and, in spite 
 of the fatalism which attended this religion, the energy of 
 its hold on the democratic tendencies of the age. For this 
 appeal to universal humanity excluded all special rela- 
 tions with deity beyond a transient inspiration akin to 
 genius. All semi-deities in human shape, for centuries 
 multiplying their names and claims ; all double or triple 
 manifestations of godhead ; all organically inspired classes, 
 — were but delusions of idolatry, without a shadow of right 
 
 1 Sura xviii. no. 
 
MAHOMET. 555 
 
 to hoard or to distribute the truth of God. He, and He 
 only, speaks to all, to prophet and slave alike ; nor is one, 
 more than another, lifted above his human defects and 
 needs by any divine message he is chosen to convey. 
 This at least was the theory of Islam in its beginning; and 
 the age so understood it, and hailed the new call to free- 
 dom. To the Jew, Mahomet allowed his theocratic idea, 
 but purged away its nationalism, its priestly traditions and 
 perversions. He left the Christian his God and Christ, 
 but smote off the three heads of his Trinity, and reduced 
 the Only Begotten to a member of the line of prophets. 
 
 " Verily Jesus is as Adam in the sight of God. He created him 
 of the dust, and said ' Be,' and he was." " Forbear to say Three; 
 it will be better for you. Believe in God and His apostles." " He is 
 all in heaven and earth, and He is a sufficient helper." " He doth 
 not command you to take the angels or the prophets as your masters. 
 It beseemeth not a man and a prophet that he should say to his fol- 
 lowers, ' Be ye worshippers of me.' " " God will not forgive the join- 
 ing of other gods to Him. Yet they call upon goddesses, they invoke 
 a rebel Satan." i 
 
 The democratic motive thus spontaneously emerging 
 from the completest form of religious monarchism reveals 
 the irony of self-destruction that awaits such belief; but 
 the vast gulf which monarchism, and especially that of 
 Islam, opened between man and his ideal, cheated the 
 promised liberty of the human faculties at once of its re- 
 sources and its fulfilment. These were to come, not in the 
 worship of an absolutely separate Will, but in the cosmic 
 science which should bring man and the universe into an 
 inseparable whole. 
 
 Nevertheless, the emancipating force of Moslem reli- 
 gious ethics was mighty in its day, and it will be seen, in 
 our study of the succeeding centuries, to have wrought 
 momentous results. Its relations to monarchical theology 
 
 * Sura iii, 53 ; iv. 169 ; v. 76 ; ix. 31 ; iii. 73, 74 ; iv. 116, 117. 
 
5S6 ISLAM. 
 
 are noted here to show how deeply Mahomet's teaching 
 was rooted in traditional beliefs. 
 
 But this indebtedness to the past must not be con- 
 founded with the current charge of borrowing largely from 
 the faiths he spurned. With the exception of two or three 
 Biblical expressions and parables which seem to be as 
 natural to the Semitic Arab as to the Semitic Hebrew, 
 hardly a trace of Christian phraseology is to be found in 
 the Koran ; ^ even the battle of the sects, raging in Arabia 
 as well as elsewhere, contributes nothing to Mahomet's vo- 
 cabulary. The bulk of his ideas, as we have seen, were 
 inherited from many preceding faiths which had mingled 
 in Arabian civilization ; but they were not consciously 
 borrowed, nor constructed into a second-hand system. 
 Jew and Christian were to his sight perverters of a revela- 
 tion older than that of either Testament, which had come 
 in its perfection only to himself; and though he freely 
 quotes both Moses and Jesus, it is never from their words 
 as the sources of his own inspiration.^ Of specific Chris- 
 tian doctrines, — depravity, atonement, and redemption, — 
 or the great miracles of Christ, there is no recognition in 
 the Koran. Even its predestination, scarcely differing from 
 the Christian, is equally near to the Hebrew, and follows 
 inevitably from his own religious conception of absolute 
 Will. That bare unmodified reality was no basis for syste- 
 
 ' Sura ii 266-268 ; xciii. 6-g. 
 
 2 Thus like Jesus he divides men at the last judgment to right and left, and ascribes to 
 God alone the knowledge when that day shall come, and mourns over the many cities God 
 has borne with and cliastised (Sura Ivi. 8, 9 ; xli. 47 ; xxii. 46). In the early part of his 
 preaching only he uses the t\\]e, Ar Ra/i»ian, — the Merciful, — in speaking of God (Sura 
 XXV. 60-64), Sprenger strangely conjectures that he must have derived it from Christianity, 
 and even that it means the Holy Spirit (ii. igS, 234). But it is used by him in the same 
 breath with the rejection of Christian dogmas, and has commonly the force only of an adjective. 
 It is possible that he dropped it in the fear that it might be taken as the name of another god 
 than Allah ; but that he should have meant it for the " Holy Spirit," the third person of the 
 hated Trinity, is inconceivable. Sprenger, who is extremely inclined to trace his ideas of 
 Islam to Christianity, has conceived a heretical Christian sect called Rahmmiists, who taught 
 Mahomet his early ascetic habits (ii. 202, 210). The term " Holy Spirit " is commonly used 
 by the Koran to designate Gabriel, as the messenger of God to his prophet. Sura xvi. 104 ; 
 iL 81, 254 ; xvii. 87. 
 
MAHOMET. 557 
 
 matic doctrine; all-sufficient is its instant inspiration, wiping 
 out all schemes and plans wrought by the reasoning of 
 those whose right was only to obey, — a reaction from ages 
 of creed-making and of fighting for the authority of terms, 
 to pure feeling, to self-surrender, to the instincts of love 
 and fear, — the passion of resistless purpose and faith. 
 
 Let us, in fine, concentrate into a few of the Koranic 
 sentences this grand central idea of Islam, the final result 
 of a long evolution of the worship of personal Will through 
 Assyrian, Median, Persian, Hebrew, and Christian forms, 
 till it reached its culmination, to burst like a century-plant 
 into flower, as if in a night, upon the world : — 
 
 "God! there is no God but He! The Living, the Eternal. No 
 slumber seizeth Him. Whatsoever is in heaven or in earth is His. 
 Who can intercede with Him but by His own permission ? He knows 
 what has been before, and what shall be after them ; yet nought of His 
 knowledge shall they grasp, but what He willeth. His throne reach- 
 eth over the heavens and the earth, and the upholding of them both 
 burdeneth Him not." '' He throweth the veil of night over the day, 
 pursuing it quickly. He created the sun, moon, and stars, subjected 
 to laws by His behest. Is not all creation and all empire His ? 
 Blessed be the Lord of the worlds ! " " Say, He alone is God : God, 
 the Eternal. He begetteth not, and He is not begotten; there is none 
 like unto Him." ^ " Praise to Him, the compassionate, the merciful, 
 king on the day of reckoning. Thee only do we worship, and to Thee 
 do we cry for help. Guide us on the straight path, — the path of those 
 to whom Thou art gracious, with whom Thou art not angry ; such 
 as go not astray." ^ " He is the indulgent, the loving." " Against 
 the evil in His creation I betake me to the Lord of the daybreak." 
 " Thou needest not raise thy voice ; for He knoweth the secret whis- 
 per, and what is yet more hidden." ^ " No leaf falleth but He knoweth 
 it; nor is there a grain in the darkness under the earth, nor a thing 
 green or sere, but it is recorded by itself. He taketh your souls in the 
 night, and knoweth what the work of your day deserveth ; then He 
 awaketh you, that the set life-term maybe fulfilled; then unto Him 
 
 * Siira ii. 256; vii. 52; cxii. 
 
 2 Sura i. i-ii. This Sura is called the "Mother of the Book," the "All-sufficing." — 
 Rodwell's Translation, note. 
 
 ^ Sura, Ixxxv. 14; cxiii. i ; xx. 7. 
 
558 ISLAM. 
 
 shall ye return, and then shall He declare unto you what you have 
 wrought." " What He wills. He doeth." " Whom He will He mis- 
 leadeth, and whom He will He guideth. Spend not thy soul in sighs 
 for the evil-minded [unbelievers] ; God knoweth their doings." " Every 
 man's fate have we hung about his neck, and on the last day shall be 
 laid before him a wide-opened book." "By a soul, and Him who 
 balanced it, breathing into each its own piety and its own sin, blessed 
 now is he who hath kept it pure, and undone is he who hath corrupted 
 it." 1 " There is no defect in His creation ; repeat thy gaze, canst thou 
 detect a flaw?" " There is no change in His dealing from of old." 
 " Praise Him at evening and in the morning, at twilight and when ye 
 rest at noon." " He quickeneth the earth when it is dead ; so too 
 shall you be brought to life." " As the heavens and the earth stand 
 firm at His bidding ; so hereafter, when at once He shall summon you 
 from the earth, forth shall ye come." " Set then thy face, a true con- 
 vert to the Faith which God hath made, and for which He hath made 
 man." '^ 
 
 " When the sun shall be folded up, and the stars shall fall, and 
 when the mountains shall be moved ; when the she camels shall be 
 left, and the wild beasts shall be gathered together; when the seas 
 shall boil and souls be paired with their bodies ; when the female 
 child that was buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put 
 to death ; when the leaves of the Book shall be unrolled, and the 
 heavens be stripped away, and the fire of hell blaze forth, and Para- 
 dise draw nigh, — then shall every soul know what it liath done." 
 " Who shall teach thee what the day of decision is ? " " What knowl- 
 edge hast thou [Mahomet] of the hour .'' Only God knoweth its period. 
 It is for thee only to warn those who fear it." " What shall teach 
 thee the inevitable ? Thamiid and Ad treated the day of terrors as a 
 lie. They were destroyed with thunderbolts and roaring blasts." ^ 
 
 Yet in this terrible Will there is the same tender care 
 and pity that go with it in the Hebrew and Christian 
 God. It says to Mahomet, who for forty years had fol- 
 lowed the faith of his fathers, and in his youth had been 
 left alone : — 
 
 '• By the noonday brightness, and by the night when it darkeneth, 
 the Lord hath not forsaken thee, nor hath He been displeased. Surely 
 
 1 Sura vi. 59, 60 ; xlii. 48 ; xxxv. 9 ; xvii. 14; xci. 7-10. 
 
 2 Sura Ixvii. 4; xlviii. 23; xxx. 16, 17, 24, 29. 
 
 3 Sura Ixxxi. 1-15 ; Ixxvii. 14 ; Ixxix. 44, 45 ; Ixix. 1-6. 
 
MAHOMET. 559 
 
 the future shall be better for thee than the past ; and in the end He 
 shall be bounteous to tliee, and thou shalt be satisfied. Did He not 
 find thee an orplian and give thee a home ; erring, and guided thee ; 
 needy, and enriched thee ? As to the orphan, then, wrong him not ; 
 and chide not away him that asketh of thee, and tell abroad the favors 
 of thy God." "Did ye think we had made you for sport, and that 
 ye should not be brought back again to us ? " " O our God, punish 
 us not, if we forget and fall into sin ; blot out our sins and forgive 
 us." "Have mercy, for of the merciful Thou art the best." "The 
 heavy laden shall not bear another's load. We never punished till we 
 had sent an apostle." " This clear Book, behold on a blessed night 
 have we sent it down for warning to mankind." " Not to sadden 
 thee have we sent it to thee." ^ 
 
 The most striking fact concerning this climax of re- 
 ligious monarchism is the pure absence of all scientific 
 evidence, all rational appeal, which it necessitated in its 
 Prophet. The organ of an autocratic Will, which set aside 
 all human conditions and interpretations by its very sim- 
 plicity and finality, he could but assume its own bound- 
 less self-assurance, and allow the hearer no suspense of 
 judgment, no choice of belief. Or, rather, he supposes 
 that in every sane and honest mind all hesitation as to its 
 primary right to instant obedience, and all doubt of the 
 ethical laws to which it recalls mankind, have already set- 
 tled into a frame of simple expectation, a waiting for the 
 revelation it is about to repeat. The hearer knows that 
 he ought to accept it, since it contains nothing new in 
 principle, and that he deserves eternal punishment if he 
 dares to reject it. The Christian had the same opinion of 
 such as " blasphemed against the Holy Spirit." The fact 
 of the Divine origin of the revelation is assumed as indu- 
 bitable, and so the denial of its truth could only mean the 
 rejection of God's will as such, for which Christianity knew 
 no forgiveness ; and Islam invented the taunts of hell out 
 of a consciousness of having doubted God.^ Such is the 
 
 1 Suraxciii. i-ii; xxiii. iig; xl!v. i ; xx. i. 
 
 * Sura, lii. 14, 15 ; Iv. 40-44. Matthew, xii. 31, 32. 
 
56o ISLAM. 
 
 logical issue of the worship of pure Will, I admit that 
 Mahomet often refers to the character of his book in evi- 
 dence that it could have only God for its author, — a point 
 open, we might have supposed, to discussion. But this 
 naive admiration of the evidential force of his own pro- 
 duction was itself an appeal to the previous moral experi- 
 ence of his hearers. It was, no doubt, well founded in the 
 best ideal thought and faith of his day. So sure was he 
 of the force of mere statement, that he believed it justified 
 his refusal to appeal to miracles, necessary as these had 
 been in previous apostles to enforce the belief of untutored 
 mcn.i His Allah was too well known to his Arabs, — even 
 to that fine literary instinct which he knew to have a de- 
 cisive voice in all their judgments, — to require arguments 
 of so little comparative worth that they had even failed to 
 convince the ignorance of past generations. It is, after all, 
 to be considered that the substance of his message, an- 
 nounced on the ultimate authority of God's will, was really 
 ultimate in human experience itself, — the inevitable law 
 of retribution; the claim of justice, of right, of humanity; 
 the unity and integrity of the moral universe ; and these 
 remain endowed with the same positive authority in ages 
 that are learning to recognize their independence of a pre- 
 determining Will. It is the true mark of the prophet, that 
 Mahomet not only insists unswervingly on these as the 
 essence of his message, but perpetually prefers to recog- 
 nize the familiar phenomena of Nature and the duties of 
 life as signs of the Divine presence, rather than resort to 
 the miraculous for that purpose.^ 
 
 The natural relations of Mahomet's vast conception of 
 the personality of God with the atmosphere of his age is 
 the only explanation of that amazing soberness and self- 
 command with which he entertained his all-absorbing 
 
 1 Sura xxvi. Ixi. 6 ; v. no. 
 
 * Pee especially the chapter on Divine Signs, entitled " The Greeks." Sura xxx. 
 
MAHOMET. 561 
 
 visions. However terrible the shock to his reason at the 
 first, tlie very utterance of his message, and the social 
 effects produced by it, seem to have soon made the Suras 
 easy of reception by his human weakness, ready to be 
 patiently interwoven with the suggestions of his own mind. 
 Nothing can be imagined more widely different from the 
 results evolved from his ideal in later epochs. There is no 
 mysticism or speculation in him : a strange ancestor for 
 Sufism and pantheism on the one hand, for Aristotelian 
 science on the other ! No respect for mere letters or fine 
 arts : a strange parent of Cordova and Bagdad, and the 
 renaissance of scholarship in the Middle Ages ! No toler- 
 ance of poetic culture : what a forerunner of more poetry 
 perhaps than all other races, besides the Semitic, have 
 produced ! No appeal to the supernatural in himself; yet 
 ere long the centre for a legendary lore as extravagant as 
 that which has invested the person of Buddha. But in 
 one respect this vast unmodified abstraction, which seemed 
 to crush all human energies, struck forth instant flashes 
 worthy of all its future powers ; it made its Prophet an 
 omnipotent leader of men, and stirred his followers to 
 conquer the world. Such the significance of ideal unity 
 in the days of its monarchic phase. 
 
 But the main sources of Mahomet's inspiration, the most 
 direct and suggestive, remain for our study. So impor- 
 tant a factor in the origin of those religions which have 
 dictated the faith of civilization for fifteen centuries, de- 
 serves attention in some detail. Whether Arabia received 
 him with understanding, or consigned the development of 
 his faith to Syria and Persia, is not now the question. It 
 could not have been accidental that the one supreme force 
 of the epoch issued from the solitudes of that vast penin- 
 sula round which the tides of empire rose and fell. Every 
 exclusive prophetic claim in the name of a sovereign Will 
 has been a cry from the desert. The symbolic meaning 
 
 36 
 
$62 ISLAM. 
 
 given to Arabia by the withdrawal of the Christian apostle 
 to commune with a Power above flesh and blood, in Ma- 
 homet became more than a symbol. Arabia was itself the 
 man of the hour, the Prophet of Islam its concentrated 
 word. To the child of her exalted traditions, driven by 
 secret compulsion out into the lonely places of the starry 
 night, his mouth in the dust, the desert spoke without 
 reserve : — 
 
 " O thou, wrapped in thy mantle, arise and warn ! Magnify thy 
 God! purify thy raiment! flee the abominable thing! Stand up all 
 night in prayer ; repeat thy Koran with measured tone; for the words 
 we send thee are weiy;hty ! " ^ 
 
 Heeren defines the desert steppes, over which the com- 
 merce of early time followed its perilous tracks, as " the 
 ocean of Asia." But the lonely caravan had other than 
 merely mercantile associations. It was the function of the 
 desert to front the voyager with the direct sense of sov- 
 ereign Will, as separate from its works, yet instant to warn, 
 to command, to revive, and to destroy. It was one of 
 Herder's boldest generalizations to credit the old desert 
 life with that keen scent for minute observation of details, 
 that passion for remote ramifications of thought, which 
 characterized the later subtlety of Arab philosophy. 
 However this may be, while certainly in a much larger 
 degree the same conditions explain the raid and the am- 
 bush, the rivalries and the revenges of a too isolated tribal 
 life, — their profoundest historic part has been to educate 
 the monopolists of revelation, the egoists of spiritual au- 
 thority. The desert was the mother of the Semitic temper- 
 ament, prompter of its personal intuitions and exaltations, 
 nurse of its autocratic deity and its imperious creeds. 
 
 " The nomad," says Ibn Khaldun, " is nearer God than 
 the settled man, because nearer Nature, more open and 
 sensitive. Given to luxury and gain, the townsman de- 
 
 ' Sura Ixxiii. 1-5 ; Ixxiv. 1-6. 
 
MAHOMET. 563 
 
 generates: the nomad desires only what he needs." This 
 preference is not the mere instinctive hate of the dweller in 
 tents for the tiller of the ground and builder of States, — of 
 Shem for Tubal-Cain ; modern travellers bear testimony 
 to the superior ijwrale of the Bedouin tribes, and to the 
 degeneracy of both sexes after a short residence in towns. -^ 
 They describe a rare refinement in physical organization, 
 a self-restraint and dignity of bearing, a pride in accurate 
 speech, — even in the absence of reading and writing, — a 
 delight in generous feelings and noble actions, which can 
 be explained only by the unchanging consciousness of a 
 supreme ideal law. The desert spaces fail not of symbols 
 of that law: the bare horizon; the slow, sure movement of 
 sun and stars ; the sky stooping from its infinite remoteness 
 close down without intervention to the earthly traveller; 
 the mystery of the universe, boundless and one, without 
 veil or refuge for body or soul, — arc all direct contacts 
 with overmastering laws, with stern realities of life and 
 death. Temple, priest, or mediator, reliance on the help 
 of man, or an instituted Church and State, are here imper- 
 tinent and impossible. Everything is immediate revelation 
 of unseen Will. The oasis springs amidst the sands, in- 
 stantaneously quickened by the word of God ; its palms 
 are the longed-for men and angels sent to cheer the lonely 
 march. Night, with its coolness and dews, a restful relief 
 from the vast monotony of level spaces and far horizons, 
 a sweet limit to weary eyes and reproof to eager hearts, — 
 night, whose fountains of primeval light have gathered for 
 all time around the silent watchers of the mysteries within 
 them and without, is the God of the desert in his kindly 
 aspect, as the burning day is his relentless wrath. " The 
 very mirage," says Sprenger, " is a theophany. Allah is 
 etymologically traced to it, as vision and gleam." ^ Recent 
 
 1 Burckhardt : Notes on ike Bedouins, i. 1S7. Geary, chap. xiv. 
 
 * Allah, according to Sprenger, is the shining vision, as of the mirage (Sprenger, i. 286). 
 Palmer says it only means the God. Goldziher : Mythology among the Hebrews. 
 
564 ISLAM. 
 
 scholars find in this difference of the desert aspects of day 
 and night the key to Semitic mythology, whose friendly 
 forms are a reflection from the night-side of Nature, its 
 hostile ones from those forces of the day on which the 
 settled tribes depend. Much of this etymological in- 
 duction is doubtless fanciful ; but that night is the soul 
 of the desert faith is indubitably shown by psychological 
 necessities of a deeper kind. The nomad's retreat into his 
 night-watches inevitably leads him into unbroken reverie, 
 slowly concentrated and kindled into the enthusiasm of 
 prophecy. When the distractions and illusions of the 
 march have silently vanished, and the petty passions are 
 stilled by the slow approaching and enfolding shadow of 
 a world-purpose, the secret chamber of his own soul be- 
 comes the one listener for whom the universe speaks. 
 Social relations or suggestions are not present to divide 
 the burden or give it objective relief. In all Arabia, not 
 one river runs that could draw off the thought to earthly 
 distances for human strivings and divided desires ; every 
 stream is lost in the immeasurable sand. The response is 
 an inward exaltation so intense that the very images that 
 have beset the senses are absorbed and lost in its spiritual 
 and moral heat. It is observable that Semitic religious 
 poetry has fewer images of the desert in proportion to 
 the degree in which the desert has been the source of its 
 inspiration ; in the Koran, for instance, they are much less 
 conspicuous than in the Hebrew psalms and prophecies. 
 Here and there Mahomet is reminded of the mirage as a 
 symbol of sin, or of the sudden burst of fertility out of 
 parched barrenness after a rain. But he is too much in 
 earnest to dwell on natural imagery. " It does not beseem 
 me to be a poet." Symbols have done their work in rous- 
 ing his self-consciousness to the intensities of duty, to hope 
 and fear, and awful command. They are transmuted into 
 personality, — hidden fuel of his absolutism as Prophet of 
 
MAHOMET. 565 
 
 the Will they have made known. Identity of subject and 
 object is here completed and instructive. As he stands 
 there on his desert rock, unmindful of physical surround- 
 ings, bent only on his message from One before whom the 
 earth and the sky are but a grain of sand, we can hear the 
 desert voices behind every accent of his warning and ap- 
 peal. Between the lines of the Koran we read the inex- 
 plicable mystic lights and shadows ; the terrible contrasts 
 of life and death ; the shifting sand-column, the unswerving 
 simoom, directed by invisible Will upon pure destruction; 
 the hopeless wastes, the bitter waters, the dry bones of long- 
 perished caravans, — all this has made the desert symbolic 
 of absolute evil, of theological wrath and eternal death. 
 And, on the other hand, the life-giving springs ; the palm 
 with its feet in burning sands and its head in the light of 
 heaven ; the herbs whose saltness is medicinal ; the sweet 
 returns of men for ages to the same fountains and shades; 
 the joyous rush of living creatures, when the great river 
 bursts from its mountains and fills the bed long dry with 
 rolling, resistless waves ; the grand uprise of the king of 
 day out of the dissolving gloom, and the cloudless autoc- 
 racy of his march, — all this has made the same desert a 
 rebuke to those old dreams of absolute evil and Divine 
 hate. In that anxious verge of hope and fear on which 
 the message runs, that sharp stress on the moment's call 
 and on the fate that goes with the instant moral act, we can 
 recognize what the Prophet has learned from the deception 
 of the mirage, — the desert's penalties for delusive hopes, 
 the hallucinations of ear and eye in pathless wastes ; from 
 the mutterings of demons far off or close by, their spectres 
 surrounding the fever-stricken pilgrim; from the voices 
 of ruined cities of an unknown past, half-buried in sand, 
 and whispering of penal whirlwinds and earthquakes that 
 have swept them away forever; and withal, from the con- 
 centration of every sight and sound on the little caravan or 
 
566 ISLAM. 
 
 lonely rider, till the world has become one mighty reflex 
 of a more or less complete egoism of religious function 
 and fanatical faith in its dictates as the voice of God. 
 
 In this introversion of the symbol there is nothing of 
 contemplative thought The roving life, the undisciplined 
 feeling and will, the physical susceptibilities, forbid it; 
 and these undoubtedly help explain the sceptical charac- 
 ter of the Arab mind, where, instead of rising into enthu- 
 siasm, it reacts from the pressure of Nature into a realism 
 all the more cautious and analytic. But if the Arab is not 
 contemplative, he is all the more certainly an impassioned 
 prophet whenever the constant presence of the Inexplicable, 
 the Inevitable, the Overruling, the Changeless among fleet- 
 ing forms, seizes his imagination and inspires his feelings. 
 The natural outcome is that absolute monotheism in which 
 we discern not only the type and reflex of intense individu- 
 alism in the conscious will, but the ceaseless suggestion of 
 the desert horizon, of sky-marches, and of unchangeable 
 facts and laws. 
 
 The germ of the Prophet of this monotheism is that 
 total self-reliance and self-sufiiciency which civilization 
 destroys. To this very hour the desert is its natural soil. 
 The Arab is and has always been the Epictetus of Nature ; 
 to him the Stoic creed is practicable, — that the happy 
 man is he who can dispense with every possession. His 
 dependence is reduced to the minimum, — to camel, water- 
 skin, mat, tent, and sword. All beyond this is accidental, 
 a badge of servitude to things. " Riches confer no influ- 
 ence here ; the sheikh lives and dresses like his meanest 
 follower. Even the Emir dares not command or scold." 
 The Turcomans say, "We are all equal; every one is 
 king." ^ Here is the pride that makes sharp critics of 
 poetry, without schools or even books ; that walks in the 
 open night as master of the heavens, without astronomy; 
 
 * Burckhardt: Notes on ilie Bedo:ii?ts, i. 65, 72, 74, 112, 117,374. 
 
MAHOMET. 567 
 
 that makes its centaur-life strong and beautiful, without 
 mechanic arts ; that girds even woman with rights and 
 dignities unknown to high civihzation.^ What need of 
 weakh or rank to him who owns the desert world ! What a 
 hut is civilization to this mount of vision, camping-ground, 
 council-field, sea of adventure, table of hospitality, tryst- 
 ing-place for song and tale and interchange of mysterious 
 love ! Here is manhood in full and free accord with its 
 outward conditions. " Voyaging is victory," says the des- 
 ert proverb. Here the bravest may not loiter, nor waste 
 his strength, nor fall back in ease; he must battle till his 
 presence, like Antar's, is a spell and a host. The modern 
 traveller scents the whole Saracenic history in the desert 
 atmosphere. " Here," exclaims one, " your morale im- 
 proves ; you become frank and cordial. Your senses are 
 quickened by the air and exercise alone, and spirituous 
 liquors only disgust. The hypocrisy and slavery of civili- 
 zation are left behind. All hearts dilate as they look down 
 from their dromedaries on the glorious desert. What trav- 
 eller did it ever disappoint?" 
 
 Was Mahomet's dream of world-liberation strange ? 
 The recesses of the desert have ever been the Rock- 
 Rimmons of the oppressed. In Africa and Arabia every 
 tribe has its proud traditions of liberty. The fatalism of 
 such a world does not quench self-assertion or suppress 
 achievement, but is thrown with omnipotent force to their 
 side. Even Ah's sentence finds its meaning, — " Despair 
 is a freeman, hope is a slave." Christianity abjures fate, 
 but its disciples might profitably study this creed of the 
 desert in its startling combination with energy and faith ; 
 for Christianity has not taught man to escape the necessity 
 that rules his life and death. 
 
 ■■ Burckhardt found among the most numerous tribes only here and there a blacksmith and 
 leather-mender. A wife can be divorced at will, but can flee to her father's house from the 
 husband's tyrannv, and be safe. The honor and defence of woman is the glory of Bedouin 
 poetry and romance. The Arabs were the parents of chivalry. 
 
568 ISLAM. 
 
 Whence, then, but from the desert could come the fire 
 that should burn up thrones and empires, and call the 
 poor to the shelter of a King of kings? What contempt 
 is bred here for the decrepitude of nations ! Is not the 
 Arab of Islam, with his whelming tide of conquest, and 
 his swift ruin of the spoils of ages, and his instant re- 
 construction of the civilized world, explicable enough? 
 Islam was the nomad claiming his original birthright in 
 the religion of personal Will. Its conquests were but the 
 triumph of an all-commanding instinct to master personal 
 barriers, to move with unlimited freedom on the willing 
 earth. 
 
 Is the religious passion that exalted these tendencies 
 into conquering forces less natural? The desert is the 
 prophet's cell and throne. Forth from its wastes march 
 the self-chosen preparers of highways for their God. 
 Moses brings its rocky sternness, Zoroaster its battle of 
 good and evil, and John the Baptist its passionate thirst 
 for waters ; Jesus its absolutism, its self-concentration and 
 self-assertion, its intolerance of the practical conditions 
 of social work, its prophecy of their swift destruction, its 
 haunting thought of the Eternal ; and finally Mahomet, 
 with not a few of these, its revelations, had, besides, the 
 flash of its sworded sunbeams, and its compulsion to 
 trust in the all-sufficiency of such means and forces as 
 await the master's will. It is not here that idolatry shall 
 sink the person in the thing, the Maker in his work, where 
 every symbol burns with concentrated purpose. So long 
 as these symbols abide. Theism shall not fail of apostles. 
 Of the sun in the desert one has said : " He seemed to 
 command me, and to say, ' Thou shalt have no other gods 
 but me.' I was all alone before Him."^ Another has 
 called Jahveh " the genius of the desert, its eternal in- 
 habitant." ^ Not more so, we may add, than Ormuzd, 
 
 1 Kinglake. ^ Quinet. 
 
MAHOMET. 569 
 
 than Allah, than the Creator and Father under every 
 name, — than all forms of suprcm.e providential care. It 
 is a Hymn of the Ages that the English traveller Pringle 
 has sung in his matchless description of a desert ride and 
 rest : — 
 
 " Afar in the desert I love to ride, 
 With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side. . . . 
 And here while the night-winds around me sigh, 
 And the stars burn bright in the midnight sky, 
 As I sit apart by the desert stone, 
 Like Elijah at Horeb's cave alone, 
 'A still small voice' comes through the wild 
 (Like a father consoling his fretful child), 
 Which banishes bitterness, wrath, and fear, 
 Saying, Man is distant, but God is near." 
 
 Such were the geographical conditions which nurtured 
 a special form of the religious ideal, dominant thus far in 
 the foremost lines of civilized humanity, — that of mono- 
 theistic revelation. The sublime unconscious egoism oi 
 its masters, the fruit of solitary prayers and struggles, is 
 essentially of the mountain, the waste, the cave, where the 
 inward message could not be shared nor brought by in- 
 stitutions or rival seers. When they trod the crowded 
 streets of Jerusalem, of Memphis, of Mecca, or Bokhara, 
 it was not as fellow-students of laws which all could see 
 for themselves, but as chosen teachers of what had been 
 commanded in themselves alone. Regions like Palestine, 
 Edom, Arabia, — deserts, or tracts encircled and set with 
 desert spaces, marked out among the nations by a pure tri- 
 bal individualism, — shaped these living types of self-asser- 
 tion and revelation. Their God could not be social, nor 
 his word a progressive reason in man. He must be a 
 solitary indivisible Force, an authority not to be scruti- 
 nized, rivalled, or shared. The infinite play of harmoni- 
 ous laws in Nature and life, in which the divine substance 
 of the world is now coming to be manifested to the free 
 
570 ISLAM. 
 
 Student of world-uses and united powers, had no place 
 there ; that nobler meaning of Unity, for which this mo- 
 narchical phase has been the preparation, is yet to appear. 
 Only the absolutely unmodified and final personal Will — 
 now a tender parent, now a terrible judge — can answer to 
 the highest forms of religious need, summed up in an ulti- 
 mate simplicity which forbids science, forecloses progress, 
 and suppresses freedom. Its word is : " / am hath sent 
 me unto you." "There is no God but One, and Mahomet 
 is his prophet." " My kingdom is not of this world." The 
 judgment day shall reveal it. On a lower plane, but with 
 no greater finality, a Genghis announces, " One God, one 
 Khan." ^ 
 
 Such influences account in no slight measure for Maho- 
 met, because they shaped the race of which he was born. 
 The genius of a race or of a civilization always determines 
 that of its highest mind ; and no examples of this law are 
 more decisive than those which are supposed to be due 
 to an inspiration superior to human conditions. In the 
 thought and method of the highest masters there is a 
 nafve element, an unconscious temperament, which pene- 
 trates all that is conditional and all that is universal. And 
 for that wonderful force of natural selection which made 
 Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries, through its 
 typical man, the autocrat of the faith and life of nations, 
 we must find the momentum in its population of free 
 tribes, swayed by the impulse of individualism, inured 
 to physical endeavors, exalted by an imaginative self- 
 conscious temperament and an intense force of personal 
 concentration. That Arab ideal of personal dignity and 
 self-respect which formed the warrior and the God of 
 Islam is conspicuous in the passion of these tribes for 
 
 * The reference here is not, of course, to the special legislation of these masters of revealed 
 religion, which, as we have seen in Mahomet, has often established freer institutions than 
 it found, but to the idea of God as unchangeable and past question or judgment of men. 
 
MAHOMET. 571 
 
 biography and genealogy. The whole poetic literature of 
 pre-Islamic Arabia for half a century before Mahomet is 
 of the lyrical, or distinctively individual, kind. Even its 
 narrative, legendary, and didactic portions are inspired 
 by the same qualities of direct intuition and free emotion. 
 The prolific energy of this national poetry cannot be con- 
 ceived without study of the immense labors of Hammer- 
 Purgstall in collecting, classifying, and translating its pro- 
 ducts ; and the strongest impression made by this survey 
 is of the multitudinous variations that may be played on 
 a few personal instincts and relations. The Hamasa of 
 Abu Temmam contains nearly a thousand poems, which 
 pour out, with startling spontaneity and frankness, the 
 jealousies, rivalries, hospitalities, ambitions, the loves and 
 hates, the magnanimities and revenges, the hopeless griefs 
 of bereavement, the stoical pride in endurance, and the 
 passionate yearnings for the lost, whereof the old Bedouin 
 life was made up.^ Their changes are rung on themes of 
 war and rapine, of tribal and ancestral pride, of haughty 
 self-assertion and self-praise, on tender tributes to worth, on 
 extremes of personal eulogy and satire, on the immortality 
 of heroic deeds, on the deep sense of the irremediable, on 
 the necessity of trust in life and death, or the pessimism 
 of brooding grief. More touching loyalty to natural affec- 
 tion and domestic ties, more freedom from all pretence to 
 solve their insoluble problems, more frank acceptance of 
 the realities of destiny, can nowhere be found. An in- 
 tensely sensuous susceptibility, a keen instinct for actuality, 
 
 1 Immense labor has been expended by the Mahometans in collecting and criticising 
 these poems of the "Age of Ignorance." The first studies were immediately after Mahomet, 
 and were purely philological ; but in less than a century poetic merit was the object of re- 
 search ; the traditions of the tribes, the memories of bards and reciters, were explored in 
 every quarter. (Muir: Royal Asiatic Society, xx. pt. i, 4472-449). Forgeries and corrupt 
 readings are of course frequent in the innumerable verses that have thus accumulated. The 
 lowest calculation of these pre-Islamic poets puts their number at one hundred and fifty ; but 
 there is no historical ground for these inquiries beyond the century before Mahomet. Wiittke 
 {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geselhcli., ix. 144, 157). Hammer,! 3S4. 
 
572 ISLAM. 
 
 easily runs into scepticism about a future life ; and old age 
 is, next to death, the saddest of prospects, — " the dregs of 
 life's full goblet." ^ No formula of immortality checks the 
 full flow of the bereaved sympathies. "Very near are the 
 dead to the living, yet how remote and dubious their com- 
 panionship ! "^ Koss lingers by the graves of his brothers, 
 and will not leave them by day or night. " How long, 
 dear ones, have you slept? Know you not I am alone 
 here, with no friends but you. Death watches you so 
 closely ; it draws my body to you in the grave. If a man 
 could offer his life for another's, how gladly would I be 
 your ransom ! Lo, I have seen the entrance to death, but 
 not its exit." ^ 
 
 In the midst of strife, blessed are the peace-makers even 
 here ; the noble men who broke up a tribe-feud of forty 
 years receive all the honor a Christian poet could accord 
 for their self-sacrifice and courage ; and their reward is 
 contrasted with the sure ignominy and misery of the self- 
 convicted foe of God and man.^ The old Arab ideal re- 
 quired every man to be "brave, generous, and a poet; " 
 a self-dependent, self-asserting personality is the soul oi 
 this prolific muse, even of her didactic proverbs.^ 
 
 " 'Tis for thee, what thou dost honor within thyself to find." 
 " Life's goods are but a loan ; fools only fancy them their own." 
 " The past is fled, and what we strive for gone ; only the moment 's 
 ours." ^ 
 "One man is better than a thousand oft." "And he whose worth 
 is known goes not to ground." " Delay and weakness are destruc- 
 tion." " He who can make the most of a part, is sure of success." 
 "Strife is the mother of despair." " Honor thy horse, and overload 
 not thy camel." "Fear God, and love thy kin." " He is generous 
 who succors them that need." " Of such as awaken neither fear nor 
 
 1 Haraasa of Abu Temmam, 447a (49). 
 
 - Hatnasa, 2Sg. See also Kremer : Gesck. d. Herrsch. Ideen d. Islains, pp. i66-i63. 
 
 * Sprenger, i. 104. 
 
 * SoJieir Ben Ebi SoltncCs M(f allakat. 
 
 ^ Mohl : Vingt-sept ans des Etudes Orient., ii. 54. ^ Hamasa, 447a (13). 
 
MAHOMET. 573 
 
 hope, make not your friends." " Be brief, for many words are wont 
 to be folly." " Let not a stranger be misused ; for many a man is worth 
 a thousand other men." "The misfortune in plans is desire." ^ 
 
 Here is none of the paraphrase and far-sought metaphor 
 that bedeck the artificial emotion of Persian poetry. What 
 this spontaneous singer utters is his bold confession, his 
 fiery impulse, his faith or his despair. The ethics of the 
 desert rest on solemn resistless laws. The sentences of 
 Lokman, the father of Arab gnomic wisdom, to whom 
 Mahomet devotes a Sura of his Koran, are charged with 
 this instinctive worship of the moral order. 
 
 " Of old we bestowed wisdom upon Lokman, and taught him to 
 say : ' Be thankful to God, join not other gods to God, this is the great 
 impiety. O my son, God will bring everything to light, though it were 
 but the weight of a grain of mustard-seed, and hid in a rock, for God 
 knoweth all. O my son, observe prayer and enjoin right, and forbid 
 wrong ; be patient under whatsoever shall betide thee. Walk not loftily 
 on the earth, for God loveth not the arrogant.' "^ 
 
 Mahomet's quotations are doubtful ; but it is certain 
 that the great semi-mythic form of Lokman rises on us 
 in the gray Arab antiquity as the natural precursor of 
 the Prophet, who found in this recognized type of the 
 race to which he belonged the substance of his own 
 message to the world. Contemporary of David, a second 
 Noah, saved from the doom of a wicked race, teacher 
 of the wisdom of animals, a patriarch twenty genera- 
 tions old, king of the primeval Sabean tribes, builder 
 of the gigantic dike of Ma'rib, Job's nephew, judge of 
 the Jews ; moreover by birth, like Antar the hero of Arab 
 romance, a black slave, — Lokman has been a centre of 
 pre-Islamic mythology for all later romance.^ Whether 
 
 1 Haninier-Purgstall : Literaticr gesch. d. Araber, i. 332 (Amru) ; and i. 39, 40 (Ektem 
 Ben Ssaifi). 
 
 ^ Sura xxxi. 10-18. 
 
 ^ Sprenger : Das Leben nnd Lehre des Mohammad: i. 95. Busch : Urgeschichte d. 
 Orients, iii. 28, 242. Wiittke (Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., ix 142). 
 
574 ISLAM. 
 
 the fables ascribed to him are of native or Greek origin is 
 still debated among scholars; but their extreme simplicity, 
 compact sense and humor, as well as the absence of all 
 associations of an advanced state of society, point naturally 
 to the traditional lore of the nom.adic tribes of ancient 
 Arabia.^ They represent the practical side of life rather 
 than the ideal, but hold fast the same centre in individual 
 responsibility; their precepts are of piety, modesty, pru- 
 dence, benevolence, and honor. Saadi says that Lokman 
 learned wisdom from the blind, who go nowhere till they 
 know the place. JMahomet might have learned of him 
 the instincts of equality and personal force. " Whoever 
 has not borne the injustice of the rich, knows not how to 
 sympathize with the poor." Nor do the legends fail to 
 find the natural man of the senses in him, gladly holding 
 him to the conditions of human weaknesses and passions. 
 
 The poets of that Age of Ignorance at least lived in 
 that direct contact with the objects of thought which 
 makes of perception pure intuition and inspiration. Their 
 songs are bursts of self-abandonment. Whatever the ex- 
 citing touch, the imagination is ready to kindle into flames 
 that consume the world. The old Arabic has no future 
 tense ; memories, traditions, hopes, are melted into the 
 moment's mood. This tactile feeling is too sensuous for 
 dogma, too keenly susceptible for theories or analyses of 
 things. A battle with circumstances opens life : a tragic 
 storm of feeling, even an outburst of sensual excess, is 
 likely to end it. Of this intensity of instinct, especially of 
 self-will, the natural outcome is apparent in vices of tem- 
 per and social conduct; but there is no orgiastic worship 
 of sensuality, as in the Phrygian rites that had infested 
 the Greek and Christian worlds.^ 
 
 ' Fables de Lokman, translated by Leon et Henri Helot, 1857. Also Sprenger, i 95-101. 
 Busch, iii. 23. 
 
 ^ See Tbarafa's Afo' allakai poem. Hammer-Purgstall : i. 305. 
 
MAHOMET. 575 
 
 The greatest of these Hbertines of picture and song 
 was Imriol-Kais. In his youth he sings his love to a 
 maiden, at hazard of his hfe ; and is saved from his 
 own father's rage by the devotion of a slave, who, when 
 ordered to put out his eyes, carries the infuriated sheikh 
 a pair of roe's eyes instead of his son's. The old man 
 relents from his barbarous purpose, but never from his 
 hatred of the muse. Yet when he is murdered, the son, 
 with instant change of heart, forsaking wine and women, 
 swears to avenge him on a whole tribe ; and, being de- 
 feated, escapes to the court of Justinian, whence he is 
 compelled by a new love-adventure to flee, and dies at 
 last, Hercules-like, of a poisoned tunic sent by imperial 
 hands.^ His genius is far more imaginative and fine than 
 that of any of his fellows. Yet though he has seen the 
 great centres of Chaldean and Persian life, and knows the 
 sea as well as the desert and the town, he none the less 
 remains the true Arab, who lives in the joy of the moment, 
 for the fair maidens like gazelles, and knows not how to 
 reflect, so urged is he by stress of life and desire. He can 
 pause to describe the freshet's rush or the pangs of love ; 
 but his pride is the free lance and victory, and his scorn is 
 for mere subsistence.^ 
 
 What stirs these knightly lays is the tragic situation, 
 the embroilment beyond relief, the command to heroic 
 sacrifice for friendship and love,^ Twelve songs of praise 
 immortalize as many women, all famous in their day.* 
 Not less ideal is the wild raid, fit school for these spoil- 
 ers of nations. The desert Ishmael glories in rhyming 
 his swoop on his neighbor's camel-herd and the feud that 
 came of it, and even the summer hunt for ostrich-eggs in 
 the sands on his swift flight through the naked land to 
 
 1 Hammer-Purgstall : i. 2g2. Wuttke (Zeitsckr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsck., ix. 149). 
 
 2 Kremer: Cidturgesch. d. Araber, i. 297. 
 
 2 Hamniei-Purgstall : i. 29, 67, 68, 70. * Ibid., i. 
 
576 ISLAM. 
 
 his beloved. He is a lord so free of his desert home that 
 it is but nature to go singing on his way.^ 
 
 "There howls the wolf: well know we one another; 
 The voice of man sounds like the bird's wild lay. 
 And night rolls o'er my head to point my work and way ; 
 At sunset I my vows renew." - 
 
 He stops his steed when at full speed, at the summons of 
 a thought, to write his Kassidet of love, his "stirrup song; " 
 his eye and ear quicker than the fine senses of the Greek, 
 — the heavens and earth and all that live and move therein 
 their larger nerves. This eye, ear, hand of the desert must 
 be his own instant and sufficient providence, king of the 
 moment by wit and will. No oath but his word ; no house 
 but his tent; no fortress but his sword; no law but the 
 traditions of masters like himself^ These old songs of 
 desert raids, in the so-called Age of Ignorance, could 
 not be dispensed with in the later days of the great Mus- 
 sulman conquests, and the glories of the Caliphate; they 
 were sung before combat in the Omeyyad camps.* 
 
 " I am he who swerves not from his plan; unmoved, whate'er befall ; 
 Who plunges 'neath the flood of death and grasps the prize he 
 
 claims ; 
 Who takes no counsel but his own mind's law, and asks no help but 
 his good sword." ^ 
 " He who drives not the foe from his cisterns will see them destroyed. 
 
 He who avoids injury to others shall not escape harm even so." ^ 
 " To the words of other men 't is common to say 7tay, when one will ; 
 
 But no man says nay to us when we give sentence." 
 " Not in all our line is there one of blunted heart, nor one who is a 
 niggard." "^ 
 
 ' Hammer-Purgstall : i. 278. 
 
 - Hammer-Purgstall: i. 258. See also Baur: Der arab. Held. u. Dichter, Ta'abbatu 
 Sarran (Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgeid. GeseUsch., x. 74-109). 
 5 Hammer-Purgstall : i. 266, 293, 321. 335, 378, etc. 
 * Kremer : Cultitrgesch- 7i>iter d. Ckali/en, ii- 356. 
 5 Hammer-Purgstall : i. 263. Saad Ben Naschib. 
 8 Wright : Christianity in A rabia, p. 66. 
 ' Poole's Preface to Extracts from the Koran, p. xv. 
 
MAHOMET. 577 
 
 " The world is ours," sings Amru, " and all that is on 
 the face of it; and none can resist our attack. When a 
 tyrant oppresses a people, we scorn to submit to his will. 
 We fill the earth with our tents, till it becomes too narrow 
 to hold them, and cover the sea with our ships." This 
 gaze over the rim of the desert after a mission to right the 
 world, hints of social aspirations beyond the impermanence 
 and isolation of the nomadic life, everywhere writ on its 
 vestiges of ruined towns and tribes. Ancestral and tribal 
 ties were the Arab's nearest approach to civil or political 
 relations ; his patriotism, his immortality, meant these. 
 " Love thy tribe ; it is more close to thee than the tie of 
 man and wife." ^ There were shrines where the tribes 
 repaired every year to hold a pious truce; where every 
 precaution was taken to avoid collisions, even to the ex- 
 tent of wearing masks and veils ; where, also, it is prob- 
 able, the imagination was kindled by fresh superstitions 
 to confirm or heighten the old terrors of solitude. Only 
 so could they counteract that all-pervading sense of tran- 
 siency which, as in the beautiful Mo'allakat verses of Lebid, 
 everywhere breaks forth in minor key, through all their 
 fortitude, freedom, and zest for sensual and warlike enjoy- 
 ments.^ A peculiar melancholy showed itself in their tem- 
 perament as soon as it was brought in contact with the 
 luxury and frivolity of Oriental manners. The desert fates 
 were stern ; and even the humanities awakened by these 
 tribal gatherings do not seem to have restrained certain 
 cruel customs arising from poverty and isolation, against 
 which the Prophet was obliged to raise his voice. All the 
 more intensely must have burned the longing and need 
 for social sympathies ; or whence that thirst for heroic 
 dealing before which our ethical refinements pale? Hence 
 the knighthood, — 
 
 1 Dozy : Histoire d'lslamistne, p. loi. 
 * Hammer-Purgstall : i. 319. 
 
 37 
 
5/8 ISLAM. 
 
 *' Whose word is enough to shield the unsheltered when peril comes, 
 in strife and storm. 
 Yea, noble are they ; not from them shall the vengeful gain the blood 
 
 of his foe ; 
 Nor shall even he who has wronged them be left without help." 
 " For the night wanderer one light is never quenched ; 
 Nor has ever a guest reproached us where men meet together." ^ 
 
 To these proud, free instincts political disciplines were 
 intolerable. From their own necessities they carved their 
 civilization. Retaliation became a restraining law; the 
 protection of chiefs a court of justice, a refuge for the 
 wronged ; chivalrous treatment of women a domestic and 
 social jurisprudence. Honor to the best and most capable 
 had drawn these fiery units as by magnetism to lines of 
 aristocratic tradition. Yet they had no genius for subor- 
 dination, no instinct of permanent unity beyond the tribe 
 itself. Mahomet united them but for a moment, and 
 through wonderful conjuncture of times and persons. On 
 his death they were all in arms, and only restrained from 
 disintegration by the genius of Abu Bekr and Omar, and 
 the prospect of foreign raids. Nevertheless, the depres- 
 sion of the desert and their unsatisfied social yearnings 
 pushed them to larger spheres of sympathy and power. 
 Mahomet's call to religious unity of purpose was followed 
 up by the more peremptory summons to boundless citizen- 
 ship and mastery, — to a national organization suited to 
 grasp an imperial world. The southern tribes, as well as 
 those in the extreme north, had reached something more 
 nearly approaching nationality than those of the inter- 
 mediate deserts ; their literature centres in the kings of 
 Himyar, Saba, and Hira, and on wars and trophies almost 
 Assyrian in type if not in scale.^ To them the crusade 
 
 * Translated from Arabic by C. T. Lyall, quoted in Poole's Extracts from tlie Koran. 
 Preface on " The Arabs before Mohammed," pp. xv, xix. 
 
 2 For a minute account of the Arabian tribes and their relations in Mahomet's time, see 
 Blau {Zeiisckr. d. Deutsck. Alorgenl. Geseilsch., xxiii. 569). 
 
MAHOMET. 579 
 
 now opening must have offered immeasurable hopes. In 
 this Arab exodus, spontaneity, force of circumstances and 
 natural reaction are so united that the resultant might well 
 have been a tidal-wave in history. The -bbme swearmg 
 of the Koran seems but the concentrated thunder of the 
 old Bedouin vows of individual passion, love and revenge, 
 pride and grief, and of absolute faith in personal destmy 
 and heroic morale. The summons it authenticated was in- 
 deed new; but it was the more inspiring in that its objects 
 were close at hand, - the overthrow of time-worn and 
 despised idolatries, and the rally of equa children of the 
 one God, Father of the fathers and Sheikh of sheikhs, to 
 mstant judgment of a disobedient world. 
 
 This preparation of the Arabs for war on idolatry may 
 be distinctly discerned in the popular, non-religious poetry 
 of the Hamasa. The old rites, however tenaciously ad- 
 hered to by their aristocratic guardians, had not only lost, 
 as we have seen, their hold on the imagination of this natu- 
 rally rationalistic race, but had even become objects of 
 hiily secular ridicule.^ It cannot be entirely explained 
 by the liberties taken with these national songs by later 
 collectors, that they contain scarce an allusion to the old 
 planetary Sabean gods worshipped in animal or vegetable 
 forms; to the cult of Venus and of the sun, long prevalent 
 in Arabia; to the idols of the Kaaba; to the male and 
 female tribal deities, or to the demonology introduced by 
 neighboring rehgions. There seems to have been a pre- 
 science even of higher rehance. When religious fear or 
 trust takes possession of the poet, its object is some uni- 
 versal power, such as Fate or Providence, or the unity of 
 
 ' Mahomet declared war against the poets as misleaders 
 of the people, partly because they criticised his claims to 
 
 ; ?::^:e^;:r J^rs:: "^^o^ ^^iuc^r. .. n...,. ..^«/. o...... 
 
 vii. 464-5°3)' 
 
580 ISLAM. 
 
 a higher inspiration than their own, and partly upon per- 
 sonal grounds. He did not enjoy the taunts of practical 
 people, who asked, " Shall we leave our gods for a crazy 
 poet? " It was not pleasant to be classed in a category so 
 large that camels and lizards were popularly described as 
 members of it. Yet he said of Lebid's line, " Is not all 
 besides God nought? " that it was the greatest of verses; 
 and glorified Said Ben Newfil for singing, — 
 
 " I .serve not O.sa and her goddess child, 
 I turn me not to Thasm's idol shrine, 
 I serve not thousand lords, but One alone ; " ^ 
 
 and found Waraka inspired, when, hearing Belal, under 
 torture for denying the gods of his tribe, cry out, " One, 
 One, One ! " he exclaimed, " By Allah, you tribe of Bclal, 
 though you slay him, you shall not have your will; " and 
 then sang an ode in praise of God.- 
 
 In fact Mahomet, though repudiating the name of poet 
 and rejecting regular metre in his Suras, was him.self in- 
 comparably the greatest of Arab poets, and has the same 
 title to the name as Amos or Isaiah.^ Perhaps, like some 
 great masters of the art, — like Goethe, partly from in- 
 tense earnestness or realism, — he regarded poetry as less 
 natural than prose. He knew well what the singers had 
 done for him in anticipating his grandest revelations. Tra- 
 dition credits him even with composing odes, and storing 
 his memory with those of other men. The Sunna says 
 " he bade that children should be taught poetry, which 
 opened the mind, made courage hereditary, and bore the 
 fruit of wisdom." Illiterate as he called himself, he had 
 no contempt for letters. He set the captives at Badr to 
 ransom themselves by teaching writing to his ignorant 
 converts.* If he set his face against the great literary 
 
 ' Hammer-Purgstall : i. 56. - Hammer, i. 56. 
 
 3 See his beautiful parables, x. 25 ; ii. 266 ; poem of the conversion of Abraham, vi. 74. 
 Sura of the Desert Horses, c 
 * Hammer, i. 396. 
 
MAHOMET. 581 
 
 reunions of Okadh, where " a magical language was built 
 ready to his skilful hand," and where the friendly rivalry 
 of tribal bards must have nourished the noblest aspira- 
 tions, it was doubtless because the old institution re- 
 fused to become merged in his own universal aims and 
 beliefs. It has been said that " in destroying it, he put an 
 end to the Arab nation and created his own new nation of 
 Muslims, who cannot sit in the places of the old Arabs." ^ 
 The change transformed a race of semi-nomads into mas- 
 ters of a world faith and law, — an unparalleled change, 
 reaching on with widening power for a thousand years. 
 Mahomet knew his instruments. He recognized his coun- 
 trymen's claims as superior to those of Jew or Christian. 
 He put every waiting capacity to ideal use. He gave his 
 nation's genius moral energy and self-mastering obedience 
 to a purpose. Carlyle has put the substance of this mys- 
 tery into words that will never be supplanted : — 
 
 " Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a nation becomes 
 fruitful, soul-elevating, great, as soon as it believes. These Arabs, 
 the man Mahomet, and that one century, — is it not as if a spark had 
 fallen, one spark, on a world that seemed black unnoticeable sand ! 
 But lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from 
 Delhi to Granada. I said the Great Man was always like lightning 
 out of heaven ; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they 
 too would flame." 
 
 So rooted in his age and country, so natural as the cul- 
 mination of ages of will-worship, what remains for Ma- 
 homet as an original personal force? As the focus of 
 tendencies, the great man becomes their new and all- 
 commanding organ. He is new and creative ; not indeed 
 as outside of the line of Nature, but as fulfilling the process 
 of existing causes, which demand concentration in personal 
 insight and will. Genius is not historical merely; it is as 
 profound a mystery in the world of mind as the new and 
 
 ' Poole : Preface to Selections from the Koran, p. xxvi. 
 
582 ISLAM. 
 
 higher element that springs into visibility from the collision 
 of flint and steel. The advent of unexpected energy in 
 the transformation of lower conditions is the law of pro- 
 gress : it is the constant sign of cosmical forces in every 
 step of evolution, — in other words, of the immanence of 
 the Infinite in the finite. When we have summed up all 
 the conditions for the result which our science can reach, 
 there remains always this untraceable element of conditions 
 past our knowing. The names we give it do not alter its 
 nature ; inspiration, revelation, miracle, latent forces, mys- 
 tery of growth, are terms, more or less blind, to cover 
 these cosmical conditions, equally real in the growth of 
 an acorn into an oak, and in that of an age or a civili- 
 zation into a religion. Genius and personal mastership are 
 powers that differ from the rest only as focal expressions 
 of more subtile, vast, and even universal conditions. This 
 is the ground of their special sanity, their redeeming, all- 
 glorifying power. Of a Shakspeare, a Goethe, a Plato, 
 there is no explanation but the universe of mind. So it is 
 with the masters of religion, of philosophy, of character. 
 They move the world, because they are the accord, the 
 rhythm, the unity of the world. Each in his way is un- 
 precedented, not to be divined nor predicted, for Nature 
 never repeats herself. His conscious conditions are deter- 
 minable only in proportion to the degree in which his 
 spirit is shared : the unconscious conditions lie veiled in the 
 infinite complexities of being and growth. But not one of 
 these untraceable personal forces can fail of having natural 
 relations to such simpler ones as are discernible by the stu- 
 dent of historical laws. So far we may go, and no farther ; 
 and this is adequate for all needful purposes. To seek an 
 ultimate analysis ol causes and conditions is here as futile 
 as to drain Thor's goblet filled from the sea. There is no 
 formula for making genius. The scientific understanding 
 may construct a manikin, but never a hero or a seer. 
 
MAHOMET. 583 
 
 Time slowly reveals where each man's personal force 
 lay, and separates what he did from what he was supposed 
 to do. But the names and lives to which the great his- 
 toric religions are traced back have been so enormously 
 idealized, and are involved in such obscurity, both of facts 
 and of records, that the difficulties are in most instances 
 insuperable. 
 
 These difficulties need not disturb us in the case of 
 Mahomet. However idealized after his death, his life is a 
 matter of verifiable record. His book and his sword were 
 his own. He is a palpable power, from the moment of his 
 Hegira, in Arabia and among the nations. Numbers of 
 the great men of Islam were his personal companions, and 
 the first four caliphs may be said to have passed from his 
 death-bed to reconstruct empires from the issues of his 
 heart and brain. Of all religious founders, this man alone 
 shaped his own work to imperial success, and substantially, 
 even within his own lifetime, through the wonderful per- 
 sonal instruments which he won to his side from out the 
 little Arab world. -^ There stand his merits and faults in 
 the full blaze of the Arabian sun, without attempt on his 
 part at concealment. He is an Arab of the Arabs, and 
 naively proud of his dependence. " I am the truest of 
 Arabs : my descent is from the Koreish, my tongue is of 
 the Beni Saad." ^ He was a nomad in genius and in taste. 
 Bokhari tells us that he said " a prophet must first be a 
 long w^iile a shepherd," and that agriculture made men 
 vain and impudent. Seeing a ploughshare, he said, 
 " When these things enter a people's house they become 
 low-minded." ^ There he stands before an unlettered race, 
 whose native genius for poetry despised all written records, 
 to cry: " Bountiful is God, who has taught man the use of 
 
 ' Ibn Icaba gives biographies of eight thousand persons who knew him. Sprenger: 
 Introduction, xi 
 
 - Kitab al Wakidi's Hisham. 
 
 ' Mussulman tradition, quoted by Goldziher: Mytltology among the Hebrews, p. 81. 
 
584 ISLAM. 
 
 the pen ; " and therewith to give forth, written on blade- 
 bones, bits of parchment, palm-leaves, and on the tablets 
 of the heart of hearers, in impure Arabic and without con- 
 structive method, out of the emergencies of inward and 
 outward struggles, the Book i^Kiirdn, somewhat to be 
 read) which should be the fountain of faith, letters, and 
 institutions to hundreds of millions of men for fifty gen- 
 erations. Here was no refinement of linguistic or logical 
 art, no elaborate rhyme, no far-fetched metaphor, but a 
 divine motion, conscious of supreme command, riding 
 forth on his confused, stammering tongue ; sweeping an 
 agonized, semi-delirious brain into contradictions, retrac- 
 tions, blind devices, confused dilemmas, strange dealings 
 with moral soundness and religious fear, — all of which 
 have been too critically judged by outside observation. 
 It seems to have been in sheer sense of failure to bear the 
 burden of his word that he called the right use of language 
 the perfection of success ; and he admitted his inability to 
 understand his revelations in their coming, so that he must 
 needs work them over after the angelic utterance, before 
 they could come to shape for mankind. Why should we 
 cavil at the marks of such self-criticism in the Koran, — 
 the conscious revisals of a message which his best render- 
 ing could only stain and mar? Vain attempt, at best, to 
 translate the open talk of a man with the God of his ideal 
 conviction, imagined as an objective real presence, and 
 hide no word, nor tone, nor hint of its meaning whether 
 to his own honor or rebuke ! Might it not well end in a 
 book, " written," as Carlyle says, perhaps not too strongly, 
 ** as badly as almost any book ever was, so that nothing 
 but a sense of duty could carry a European through it, — 
 an incoherent bundle of experiences, no more capable of 
 certain arrangement than the ripple-marks on a beach 
 after heavy storms " ? Yet in all this the marvellous Ara- 
 bic tongue went through a transformation that consigned 
 
MAHOMET. 585 
 
 all Mo'allakats, Kassidets, or other literary treasures to 
 comparative oblivion, — no continuation of their styles 
 even, but a new creation. What triumphant mastery so 
 to transform a nation's jealously guarded ideal, mingling 
 native with foreign words ! For language was the Arab's 
 religion more than all the gods of the Kaaba ; yet the 
 Koran, the Koran only,"is henceforth the norm of books 
 to this book-adoring Arab, the veritable Arabic speech 
 of Allah, the tracing of the infinite pen ! 
 
 " See you not that I, an ignorant prophet, could never have done 
 this thing, — lifted your organ for the love-songs of Imriol-Kais, or the 
 Hanifite Rolls of Abraliam, into a holy tongue for all mankind ? Ask 
 you greater miracle than this, O unbelieving people, than to have 
 your profane Arabic turned into a message of universal mercy, a 
 thunderbolt against tyranny, a trumpet to call the world to singleness 
 of heart and faith? Do they bid thee change it? Say, it is not for 
 me to change it by my own will. Verily, I fear if I rebel, the punish- 
 ment of the great day." 
 
 Yet this supernaturalist, cowering under the terrors of 
 his own awful trust, has been detected by the modern critic 
 in altering, transposing, reconstructing, to suit new con- 
 junctures, till the whole is past the critic's analytic and 
 collocating skill. Hence the ready charge of hypocrisy, 
 the cool dealing of an impostor with his own fraud. Why 
 not find rather an over-anxious care to get the momentous 
 message rightly put by the half-seeing human faculties, 
 whose light on its meaning can only be made clear by 
 the process of events? 
 
 Successful he was at all events, blind and confused as 
 the message lay before his companions at his unlooked-for 
 death, when he who alone could say what was in it, was no 
 longer with them. Only a year elapsed before his scribe 
 Zeyd must gather up its fragments, so that it could be 
 committed verbatim by heart. Then, eighteen years after- 
 wards, when his first companions were all dying in battle, 
 and an authentic version must be hastened up, the same 
 
586 ISLAM. 
 
 hand is set to compiling an even more careful text. Caliph 
 Othman, the third of the line, fixes this as the final appeal 
 of Islam, now centred, as a positive faith is bound to be, in 
 a Book of books, and all other versions are burned through- 
 out the empire (650 A.D.). No arrangement seemed then 
 feasible but to put the longest Suras first, where the sharp 
 historical criticism of to-day says they do not belong. 
 Even now it lies in its well-nigh structureless plasma of 
 emotion, beat up from abysses of woe, lifted on gusts of 
 passionate will, paling with confession, glowing with fierce 
 rebuke, — strange, unconscious chaos of objective truth 
 with subjective error. If it is not poetry, — and it is hard 
 to say whether it be or not, — it is more than poetry. It 
 is not history, nor biography. It is not anthology, like 
 the Sermon on the Mount; nor metaphysical dialectics, 
 like the Buddhist Sutras; nor sublime homiletics, like 
 Plato's conferences of the wise and foolish teachers. It 
 is a prophet's cry, Semitic to the core ; yet of a meaning 
 so universal and so timely that all the voices of the age 
 take it up, willing or unwilling, and it echoes over palaces 
 and deserts, over cities and empires, first kindling its 
 chosen hearts to world-conquest, then gathering itself up 
 into a reconstructive force that all the creative light of 
 Greece and Asia might penetrate the heavy gloom of 
 Christian Europe, when Christianity was but the Queen 
 of Night. -^ In the eleventh century, when the Christian 
 Church was the mortal foe of science and of Nature, five 
 thousand two hundred and eighteen teachers of the schools 
 of the Koran were commending these studies to the civil- 
 ized world. Saduk, when asked why the Koran appeared 
 the newer the more it was read, answered, " It was not sent 
 for one age or time, but for all mankind to the end of the 
 world." ^ Its monotheism was the climax of exclusive 
 
 ^ See St. Hilaire's testimony. Jongiiiere : Hist. deP Empire Ottoman,'^. 86. 
 - Wiittke (Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. GeselUch-, ix. 137). 
 
MAHOMET. 587 
 
 religion ; yet so all-embracing was its objective ideal that 
 it created the largest unities in the sphere of religious 
 belief. " The leaves of God's book," said its Sufis, " are 
 the religious persuasions." 
 
 Much of a similar nature might be said of the powers 
 of other Scriptures. The difference is, that of this book 
 Mahomet was himself the indubitable maker. There is 
 no pretence that any apostle conceived, or gathered, or 
 fathered it upon his master. No lapse of a period like 
 that which separates most of the New Testament writings 
 from the days of Jesus, parted it from the living subject; 
 no deposit was ever made in it of Jewish or Arabic stores 
 by later schools. Even the many elaborations which the 
 merciless scalpel of the critic now brings to view, are un- 
 questionably of Mahomet's own devising. Crowded with 
 national traditions, and steeped in foreign lore and garbled 
 legend out of every faith, the Prophet's ideal purpose flames 
 through the whole, fusing everything over and over again 
 to satisfy the needs of the houi* I hold it to be as abso- 
 lutely sincere as any human book composed under the 
 pressure of imagined Divine special direction has ever 
 been or can be ; its faults reveal best the inherent falsity 
 of the conception itself, but it is none the less the irre- 
 pressible cry of a possessed enthusiast and apostle of his 
 times. The miracle of the book, of the rhymed prose 
 that silenced the pride of ancestral metres, the mark on 
 ages and tribes that never grows dim, is the son of Ab- 
 dallah himself. 
 
 Probably we may say that there is nothing like this 
 record in the whole history of authenticated personal 
 achievement. Results even more amazing are ascribed 
 by Christian faith to an historic personage, but under cir- 
 cumstances that forbid our knowing what he really was 
 and did. In the one case, everything not purely ideal has 
 been smoothed away from the adored image of an incar- 
 
588 ISLAM. 
 
 nate God, age after age; in the other, there stand out, 
 honestly admitted, all the errors, irrationalities, and delu- 
 sive dreams that belong to the pretension of supernatural 
 claims and private revelation. 
 
 It seems incomprehensible that far down into the pres- 
 ent century, through all ages of Christian development, 
 this name has been synonymous with Satan, and its swarm- 
 ing confessors abhorred as infernal hosts. So much can 
 the rivalries of creeds and churches effect in foreclosing 
 even the desire of justice. With Christendom, the relent- 
 less charge of infidelity and imposture has rested on the 
 assumption that every claim to personal inspiration, save 
 that of Jesus, must have been a conscious lie. He and 
 none other could by any possibility be honest and sane in 
 claiming to be the Son of God and "Judge of quick and 
 dead." The inconsistency proves that reason repudiates 
 the claim itself. Still more glaring is the theological 
 malice of the highest minds, persevered in down to the 
 moment when Arab histoi4ans like Al Hisham, Abulfeda, 
 and others forced open the eyes of scholars in the present 
 age; and the dense ignorance of Christendom concerning 
 Mahomet and his work for civilization was scattered by 
 resultant studies of the Book and the Faith. 
 
 It was natural, since the fine arts were the pupils of the 
 Church, that, while Michael Angelo painted the Christ as 
 awarding eternal life and death at the last judgment, an- 
 other great painter — Orcagna — should represent Mahomet 
 as torn in pieces by devils, and that Dante should find him 
 cloven in twain and displaying his rent bosom in hell for 
 having torn the Church by schism. ^ Yet we cannot con- 
 ceal the fact that not a century before this terrible anath- 
 ema the great Arabic work of SharastanT had shown how 
 much broader a feeling of the sympathy of religions than 
 existed in Christendom, had sprung up in the soil of the 
 
 1 Inferno, xxvili. 
 
MAHOMET. 589 
 
 Koran.^ Protestantism, worshipping its own Bible, had all 
 the less tolerance for a rival Bible, and from the outset pro- 
 nounced its author the chief of liars. It would serve little 
 purpose to enumerate the phases of this wild and worth- 
 less abuse. So fully identified were the titles " impostor" 
 and " infidel " with this one name, that they became catch- 
 words for historians of all grades, from Prideaux to Hallam.^ 
 Even Goethe, in his tragedy of " Mahomet," makes him a 
 ruthless, unprincipled assassin, without a sign of faith in 
 his own creed. To this very day that mediaeval exegesis 
 frequently reappears, and the little horn of Daniel's vision 
 still reminds Christendom of the Antichrist of Mecca, and 
 aggravates political hatred towards his infidel lair upon 
 the Bosphorus. The first word of justice to the accursed 
 Paynim was spoken by that earliest and kindliest of Eng- 
 lish travellers. Sir John Mandeville, — a clear bugle-note in 
 the night of superstition and hate. Four centuries passed 
 before another noble tribute was paid to the worth of Islam, 
 when Lessing struck the key of modern religious liberty in 
 his " Nathan the Wise." How^ it startled English decorum 
 when Carlyle dared to lift Mahomet among the heroes of 
 history, in letters of fiery indignation ! Then came scholars 
 like Sprenger and Kremer,^ Noldeke, Dozy, Geiger and 
 Rodwell, Sale and Lane, with clearest proof that here was a 
 force too vast and too concentrated to be treated with con- 
 tempt, and that the Prophet and his message were in the 
 natural order of historic movement. The sum of all evi- 
 dences, now abundantly available, will convince us that this 
 exalted person was in fact substantially real and sincere, 
 
 1 The History of Religions Sects. 
 
 2 See Retian : Etudes d' Histoire Reiigiej/se, p. 223. 
 
 3 Kramer, especially {Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam and Culinrgesck. unter d. Chali/en\ 
 has done full justice both to Mahomet and his religion. The same cannot be said of 
 Sprenger's learned and minute biography, which refuses him every quality of greatness and 
 even of common morality, finds no element of genuineness in him save his fanaticism, — a 
 pathological cnndition merely, — and no sign of original genius or noble motive. Sprenger is 
 not a generous critic, nor is he capable of spiritual insight ; but he shows even to excess the 
 dependence of Mahomet on his times. (See, especially. Das Leben, etc., i. 39-49.) 
 
590 ISLAM. 
 
 wonderfully self-sustained and self-directed towards ideal 
 ends, and rooted, not in his age and its demands only, but 
 in the truth of things and the soul of truth. 
 
 Mahomet had at once the temperament of genius and 
 the tendency to melancholia, noticeable even at the present 
 day in the Arab race. Naturally modest, timid, irresolute 
 even, extremely sensitive to pleasure and pain, he was 
 easily carried beyond self-control by impressions from the 
 moral and spiritual imagination, to which he ascribed ob- 
 jective reality. How far these phenomena were caused by 
 the morbid excitability of his pli)'sical system, subject to 
 febrile and cephalic spasms from what has been defined as 
 " muscular hysteria," and how far the disease itselt was a 
 result of mental convulsions, it is not easy to determine. 
 His birth fell at a period of intense affliction in the life of 
 his mother; but it is little less than atrocious to ascribe 
 his whole history to that circumstance.^ Partly from dis- 
 ease, and partly from moral and religious passion, that 
 projection of inward into outward sense, which has had 
 more or less to do with the experience of men of genius 
 like Luther, Swedenborg, Goethe, and others, rose into a 
 permanent state of exaltation by supposed possession, 
 demonic or divine, and at last into absolute self-surrender 
 to the inspirations of the Supreme Will through the visits of 
 its angelic messenger. Yet we must not ascribe too much 
 of this conviction to special disease, since it was the natu- 
 ral product of belief in anthropomorphic deity, and as 
 true of Moses and Jesus as of Mahomet. Down to m.odern 
 
 * Robertson Smith. Sir W. Muir goes to the opposite extreme, in clenyin,c; this depend- 
 ence, but charges him with dehberately abandoning his inspiration to expediency ; evidently 
 dissatisfied that he "did not become, as he might have done, a St. Mahomet, or founder of 
 Christian churches in Arabia by martyrdom." 
 
 E. A. Freeman's History and Conquests of the Saracens passes a judgment for the most 
 part hberal and just, tliough not without some superficial criticism (pp. 52, 53, 57). Oscar 
 Reschel {Races 0/ J\Ien, 302) coolly calls him " a crafty impostor." As fair an account of the 
 whole subject as can be found is the work of R. Bosworth Smith, in entire contrast with which 
 is the one-sided little treatise on Islam published by the Society for promoting Christian 
 Knowledge, in their non-Christian Systems. 
 
MAHOMET. 591 
 
 times every one believed in the possibility of inspiration, 
 and in the direct movement of the Divine Will upon man 
 by vision or by voice. How easily it adapted itself to the 
 ordinary mental processes of its subject is seen by the 
 remarkable degree to which this medium of the Infinite 
 remained Mahomet, son of Abdallah, still, — no mere 
 dreamer, but prudent, skilful, and self-controlled in the 
 details ot his appointed work. He was of noble form, of 
 genial, tender manners, humane and sympathetic, and of 
 an integrity that had won him the title of El Amin, — the 
 Upright.^ The tales of his recognizing with tears ol grati- 
 tude, in a captive brought to him after battle, the old nurse 
 who had tended him in his childhood among the Beni- 
 Saad ; of the courage with which he faced the rage of 
 Omar; and the firmness of his religious loyalty, which 
 would not yield to the prayers or rebukes of his only pro- 
 tector among the leaders of his tribe, — are sustained by 
 the general tenor of his conduct. He had belonged to a 
 society of chivalrous men, formed for the protection of 
 foreign traders against ill treatment in Mecca. According 
 to tradition, the descendant through five generations from 
 the founder of the glories of the Koreish, the real father of 
 Mecca itself, he was overarched by the immemorial majesty 
 of Abraham and his temple, with its holy stone coeval 
 with creation. His divine commission is foreshadowed 
 by events in the lives of his immediate ancestors. His 
 father, thrice chosen by lot as a sacrifice, is thrice saved by 
 substitution of animal victims on a great scale. His grand- 
 father is born with white hair (innate wisdom), digs out the 
 well Zemzem.and finds old buried treasures of sacred things. 
 This messianic prestige is held of no account by Sprenger, 
 who places him in a decayed branch of the Koreish, con- 
 fined to the right of supplying pilgrims with water.- 
 
 ^ Dozy : L'Hisioire d'Islamisme, p. 21. Also Selections, etc.. Preface, pp. 28, 29. 
 2 Sprenger: Das Leben, etc., i. 141. 
 
592 ISLAM. 
 
 The serious introversion that determines his destiny is 
 made conceivable by his having been left an orphan in 
 infancy, bereaved of his grandfather's care in boyhood, 
 and set to the lonely and despised work of tending goats. 
 However it may be, he walks modestly and industriously 
 among men till his hour comes, a trusted and honored 
 merchant, whose chief employer is proud to become his 
 wife. Slowly the heavens and earth fill with predestined 
 vision and command. Everything in him — powers and 
 defects, will and temperament, honor and fear — works 
 together to intensify his destiny. Even the cataleptic 
 trances serve to convince his nearest companions of a 
 divine afflatus. In his youth a devout believer in the 
 popular polytheism,* slow to fix his faith on the absolute 
 unity of God, and overwhelmed by the burden of inspi- 
 ration which he could not resist, the solitary dreamer is 
 convulsed by spiritual throes, in which familiar super- 
 stition and terrible self-disparagement by turns torment 
 him, till he is driven to the brink of self-destruction, and 
 saved only by the gracious whispers of his divine guest. 
 He hurries back from the desert, trembling like a child, to 
 the bosom of his Khadija, praying only to be covered, 
 whether from the overwhelming presence or from the 
 night-chills of his agony — who can tell? 
 
 For two years imprisoned or shut out from social sym- 
 pathy, his inward struggles become the more impassioned 
 and desperate. But the angel has bidden him be patient, 
 and in due time comes the self-surrender and the conso- 
 lation, and at last the irresistible outflaming of his ideal 
 into that image of omnipotent absolutism to which the 
 worship of personal Will has in all ages steadily led its 
 believers. Yet he shows neither the rage of the Christian 
 Montanist nor the conceit of a Neoplatonic theurgist. 
 Year after year he follows the command to convert and 
 
 ' Koran, xclii. 7 ; Ixiv. 5. 
 
MAHOMET. 593 
 
 save mankind, with but one loyal woman to encourage 
 him. He counts but thirty followers as the reward of 
 three years of life-and-death struggle, not with the proud 
 traditions of his native city alone, and the Koreish, their 
 representatives, but with the common-s^ense of a sceptical 
 people, who had known him from childhood, and who now 
 verily believed him to be a crazy poet, and mocked him 
 with questions about the latest news from heaven. It was 
 a sharp test of his sincerity to be rejected by the wisest 
 and best people, and ridiculed by the popular good sense. 
 Yet he persevered, unmoved. Even the kind remonstrances 
 of Abu Talib, his only relative and protector among the 
 great men, were put aside, though with tears. " If Allah 
 should put the sun in my right hand and the moon in my 
 left, to abandon his great work before I have accomplished 
 it or to perish in the attempt, I would not abandon it." 
 The brave old Arab was moved : " Say what you will, I 
 will not forsake you."^ Tabari tells us that the very stones 
 cried out to hail him as the prophet of God. Called on 
 to prove his mission by miracles, he dares to rest every- 
 thing on the power of his conviction and the efificacy of 
 his word. Once^ his great central truth pales a moment 
 before the temptation to a compromise for the benefit of 
 his cause, so that he permits himself to recognize some 
 good in the popular worship, though by no means to admit 
 the divinity of the false gods; and the readiness of the peo- 
 ple, on so slight a concession, to fall on their knees before 
 Allah, proves how easily he could have had their applause 
 for the seeking. But the sin of policy will not let him 
 rest till he has renounced it, with all its rewards, even be- 
 fore they have been enjoyed. No tampering with truth ! '^ 
 Even when a friend who had dared defend him, though 
 unconverted, asks the crucial question what has become of 
 
 1 Dozy : VHutoire cTIslamisme, p. 45. ' Sprenger, of course, makes the most of it. 
 
 3 Dozy: V Histoire d''Isla)nisme,p. 50. 
 
 38 
 
594 ISLAM, 
 
 his son, dying outside of the true faith, the answer is un- 
 flinching, — " He is in hell ! " and the father's face is turned 
 away in natural vvrath.^ Though some of his earliest fol- 
 lowers who took refuge in Abyssinia were of good families 
 and not without means, most of those who heard gladly 
 the preacher of equality and a simple faith were poor, 
 ignorant, and despised persons, many of them slaves.^ 
 Naturally enough, — the data of that problem being then 
 as inscrutable and inconclusive as they are now, — he could 
 give but an incoherent account of the methods by which 
 the Divine will was made known to him. Sometimes the 
 revelation was gentle, sometimes like the ringing of bells, 
 "which rent him in pieces; "and the interjectional out- 
 breaks and transitions of the Suras confirm his story. 
 
 Mobbed, stoned, assailed by plots and passions, his fol- 
 lowers driven from Mecca, outlawed, imprisoned, or starv- 
 ing, for ten years Mahomet struggles on, never doubting 
 the sovereignty or the purpose of his Guide. The first 
 gleam of success comes through the old hostility of the 
 desert to the city, — in the conversion of two Bedouin 
 tribes, more from hate to Meccan aristocracy than from 
 love to him or to each other; and from their jealousy of 
 the Jews of Medina, against whose claims of a Messiah 
 they were glad to set a prophet from their own race. Then 
 out of the enmities of Mecca and Medina came the seventy 
 Helpers (Afisdr') of the latter city, who offer him the one 
 possible refuge. At last he must flee for his life, with but 
 one companion to share his perils, save that the God of 
 his old desert struggles makes the third ; for whom, as the 
 legend runs, nothing stronger than a spider's web across 
 the cave's mouth was needed to save the servant of His 
 will. 
 
 It is a commonplace, even for liberal Christianity, that 
 the life of Mahomet of itself proves on how much lower 
 
 * Dozy : VHisioire d'Islatnisine, p. 57. * Sprenger : Das Leben, etc., i. 392. 
 
MAHOMET. 595 
 
 and narrower a plane his religion stands than docs that of 
 the gospel of Christ. There is great need of careful dis- 
 crimination in the study of religious ideals ; but how can a 
 more universal conception possibly be framed, so long as 
 wc stand witJiin the limited idea of Personal Revelation, 
 than that of one sole God of heaven and earth, making 
 known His will by sovereign choice of instruments, " in 
 mercy to all mankind"? Nor can anything broader and 
 more humane be easily imagined, under these limits, than 
 Mahomet's obedience to a moral and religious instinct in 
 the shape of such a conception. " For this," he says, " I 
 ask of you no wage but the love of my kin." ^ The demands 
 of humanity were always closest, in his mind, to the heart 
 of God. The fear of becoming poor through giving to 
 others was a diabolic suggestion. Giving for righteous- 
 ness' sake " is like a grain of corn that produceth seven 
 ears, and each ear a hundred grains." ^ All he had and 
 gained was spent on his work, and he left neither debt nor 
 substance behind him. " Shall they have a share in the 
 kingdom, who would not bestow on their fellow-men the 
 speck in a date-stone? "^ " He who shall mediate between 
 men for a good purpose," says this reputed " Prophet of the 
 Sword," "shall be the gainer thereby; but the mediator 
 for evil shall reap the fruit of his doing." * When he said, 
 " Let there be no compulsion in religion,"^ his conduct 
 showed that he meant it. 
 
 His first success was uniting hostile tribes in a common 
 faith a;id purpose, substituting referees for the old tribal 
 blood-penalties, inducing each of his Meccan followers to 
 choose a brother among the jealous Helpers of Medina, 
 and planting such germs of cordial relations among all 
 believers.^ It shall be an " expiation with God " when 
 one shall drop his right of retaliation according to the 
 
 1 Sura xlii. 22. ^ Sura ii. 263. 3 gura iv. 56. 
 
 * Sura iv. 87. ^ Sura ii. 257. * Il»t Hishdtn, i. 250. 
 
596 ISLAM. 
 
 old Jewish law} Wrangling over creeds is his abhor- 
 rence. " What, wilt thou force men to believe, when be- 
 lief can come only by the will of God? " ^ " Jew, Sabean, 
 or Christian, — whoever shall believe in God and the judg- 
 ment, and do what is right, on him shall come no fear." ^ 
 The constitution, drawn up to fix the relations of his Mec- 
 can fugiti\'cs with the Jews and Christians of Medina, is to 
 /similar effect.^ To all conquered nations he offered liberty 
 of worship on payment of tribute ; and in this he was fol- 
 lowed by his first generals, so that the Mussulman arms 
 were welcomed by the oppressed of every land.^ The 
 humiliations to which the vanquished were subjected were 
 political only. It is evident that proselytism by the sword 
 was wholly contrary to his instincts. His Islam itself be- 
 ing substantially akin to Judaism and Christianity, he was 
 strongly inclined to adopt forms and traditions from both 
 these faiths. It was Omar who lifted the standard of an in- 
 dependent religion, and nationalized Islam by centralizing 
 its worship in Mecca as the Kebla,*" — to Mahomet merely 
 a matter of convenience, preferred to Jerusalem after his 
 break with the Jews. "To God belong East and West alike, 
 and whichever way ye turn. His face is there." '^ Appeal 
 to the sword was involved in the practical necessities of his 
 monarchical creed, but it was not deliberately chosen. 
 
 After the flight to Medina his followers were in great 
 indigence, and would have been put to death but for the 
 arms in their hands,^ The Koreish had sworn Mahomet's 
 death, and their army was in the field before he heard 
 God's command to battle. Enraged that they could not 
 use him to convert Arabia to Judaism, and that his belief 
 was so much simpler than their Talmudic legends, the Jews 
 
 1 Sura V. 49. - Sura x. 100. ^ Sura ii. 59 ; v. 73. 
 
 * Sprenger: Das Leien, etc., iii. 21. 
 
 ^ Dozy : V Histoire (f Islamisme, p. 1S4. See Ahfl Bekr's noble counsels to his army of 
 invasion on the march to Syria. Ockley : History of the Saracens, p. 94 (Bohn). 
 ^ Sura ii. 139. ' Sura ii, 109. * Braun, p. 5S. 
 
MAHOMET. 597 
 
 of Medina attempted his life ; and poison administered by 
 a Jewess was believed to be the remote cause of his death. 
 On the scabbard of his sword, the Persian legend says, 
 was written: "Adhere to those who forsake you; speak 
 truth to your own heart ; do good to every one that does 
 ill to you." ^ He justified anathema and war on unbeliev- 
 ers, at first, on account of their aggressions.^ 
 
 "The infideLs help each other; unless ye do the same, there will be 
 great demoralization." ^ "They regard not in a believer either ties of 
 blood or faith ; when they break their oaths of alliance, and revile your 
 religion and attack you, then do battle with them." * 
 
 It has been well said that it is the political rather than 
 the religious authority of Islam that has been propagated 
 by force. Mahomet overturned governments in the name 
 of God, like the leaders of every other positive religion 
 save Buddhism, but never from love or desire of mere 
 destruction. His institutions prove this, — never hostile 
 to proprietorship, never false to the people, never nihilistic 
 in their iconoclasm. 
 
 The change in Mahomet's spirit towards unbelievers can 
 never be understood by those who do not perceive that 
 monotheism, conceived as the source of a revelation, must 
 be exclusive and destructive simply because it is one of the 
 necessities of its commands that they shall be executed. 
 It is not revelations, but science and humanity, that allow 
 liberty to doubt and deny. As soon as a positive religion 
 has reached the point of practical organization and exten- 
 sion, and is brought into conflict with the forces it would 
 supersede, it appeals to force as naturally as it appealed 
 at first to persuasion. As soon as Christianity acquired 
 
 * Deutsch : Der Islam, p. 6i. T/ie Hyai-iil-Kulub (Merrick, p. 235) draws a marvellous 
 picture of the humanities with which he invested the cruel necessity of war. 
 
 2 Dozy : L^Hisi. des Mitsui., i. 152. 3 Sura viii. 74. 
 
 * Why Sprenger should call this perfidious, is difficult to discover. Ibn Ishak's traditions 
 maintain this self-defensive character of his warfare. — Sprenger, iii. 4S1. Ibn Hisham, i. 230, 
 373i 376- Sura ix. 10, 12. 
 
598 ISLAM. 
 
 strength enough to draw the notice of the powers of this 
 world, it forgot its non-resistance and its unworldhness, 
 and set the example which Islam was not slow to follow. 
 It rose to sway by a warfare even more long-continued and 
 barbarous against every form of unbelief; mostly waged 
 by civil and fraternal hates. To this day, wherever science 
 has not infused a new soul, the old necessity of all revealed 
 religions — " compel them to come in" — holds its own, in 
 spirit, if not in power. Mahomet resisted the temptation 
 to return blow for blow as long as it was possible. Had 
 he been slain after a few years of his ministry, or, like 
 Jesus, at a much earlier period of it, he would have died 
 with words of mercy and forgiveness on his lips, — a 
 divine man, but not the founder of a positive religion. 
 While the prophet's function remains individual, he may 
 follow the loftiest ideal; the conditions upon which his 
 faith becomes accepted and organized in society are very 
 different. Whether it is forced to meet them in his own 
 person or in the devotion of his followers to his cause, the 
 price is a sacrifice of that higher morality for ignoble 
 means. In this respect, so inevitable is the logic of ideas 
 by which each in turn shows its imperfection and enforces 
 a better ! 
 
 Once convinced of Allah's will that the new word should 
 be received by His creatures, the Prophet naturally found 
 in every invincible condition of that result a new divine 
 guidance, which glorified every instinct and demand. We 
 can only wonder that in such an age so much freedom, 
 humanity, and constructive aim attended his steps. We 
 can mark the period when the necessity of conquest took 
 possession of his mind, in those haughty letters-missive to 
 the emperors of Rome and Persia, demanding submission 
 to the will of God. Yet on the great day of triumph, when 
 he entered the old shrine of Mecca and broke down the 
 idols, it was not in wrath, but in pity, — announcing amnesty 
 
MAHOMET. 599 
 
 almost universal, commanding protection to the weak and 
 poor, and freeing fugitive slaves. No self-exaltation, but 
 the same democratic habit towards men, the same humility 
 before God.^ Against a few acts of severity^ — a part of 
 which are fully proved to have been military necessities, and 
 a part are but indirectly his work, while all are merciful in 
 view of what might have been expected in the situation 
 and the customs of the times — we may put the prohibition 
 of selling children apart from their parents, the rebuke to 
 his generals for barbarous warfare and the effort to com- 
 pensate the families of their victims, incessant care for the 
 poor and suftering, and hosts of noble precepts for making 
 religion one with humanity.^ Even the list of graver 
 charges which Renan and Sprenger have given in full, — 
 such as direct deception for his own advantage, charged on 
 the will of God, and a general policy of paltering with the 
 moral law, — have in part been disproved, and in part are 
 explicable as natural in one whose single aim was the fulfil- 
 ment of an inspired mission ; as Renan somewhat naively 
 says, " Man is too weak to bear the burden of apostleship 
 very long." It would be equally true to add that the 
 sense of inspiration is simply the self-affirmation of one's 
 whole nature, — rational, passionate, instinctive, as alike 
 instruments to the appointed end."* There is no instance 
 in history of a religious founder under these conditions 
 so ready as Mahomet to confess his faults, whether of 
 momentary weakness towards idolatry or of personal un- 
 kindness towards others. The early death of Jesus was 
 fortunate for his example, but it did not alter the law of 
 deterioration ; that was only reserved for those who gave 
 
 ' Smith, p. 128. Sprenger : Das Leben, etc., iii. 331. 
 
 * See these charges in Sprenger, iii. chap. xix. On the other side, Smith, pp. 122, 123. 
 Freeman : Conquests of the Saracens, pp. 42-49. 
 
 2 Poole: Introduction to Lane's Selectio^is from the Koran, pp. Ixiii-Ixv. Sprenger, 
 
 J 321- 
 
 ' Renan: Etudes d'Histoire Relif^ieuse, p. 252. See Bosworth Smith, pp. 122, 123. 
 Also Freeman : Conquests of ilie Saracens, pp. 42-49. 
 
600 ISLAM. 
 
 his church its hold on society. This burden Mahomet 
 could not shift from his own neck. 
 
 Mahomet had a great sensuous nature, and it was doubt- 
 less a source of his success. But polygamy was the ine- 
 radicable demand for male offspring in the East ; nor did 
 his permission of it, under the conditions he enforced, 
 add to its strength. For himself, his fidelity to his wife 
 Khadija during her whole life, and his devout gratitude 
 to her to the end of his own, outweigh all charges of 
 mere bald sensualism on the excesses of his later years. 
 All his children were born before he entered on his mis- 
 sion, and all were Khadija's. The propensity to enlarge 
 his harem was gradually developed, and has been ascribed 
 by Sprcnger to a phase in his nervous disease. Yet the 
 same critic has dealt much too severely with his procur- 
 ing the cession of a wife from his follower Zeyd, — an act 
 which can only be judged after a full view of the persons 
 and relations. The supreme rights of the Prophet in these 
 and other respects are simply analogous to those assumed 
 by all other claimants of special revelation and authority. 
 
 Low as was Mahomet's estimate of woman and rude as 
 Islam has always been to her in his name, devoid as the 
 Koran is of that chivalrous spirit of which she was the 
 ideal in the life of the older Arabs, his regulations really 
 improved her condition, by abolishing the cruelties to 
 female children, by limiting the number of wives for each 
 man, punishing infidelity and kindred crimes with extreme 
 severity, making divorces less easy and subject to severer 
 conditions and humane obligations, and requiring proof 
 by four witnesses of adultery on the part of a wife.^ 
 Mahomet gave women the right of inheritance, — half a 
 male's part, — and the right of disposing of property ; and 
 forbade temporary marriage arrangements, besides putting 
 the children of concubines on a level with those of wives.^ 
 
 1 See, especially, Sura iv.; Ixv. i-6. ^ Sura iv. 23. 
 
MAHOMET. 60I 
 
 The prevailing belief that the Koran does not admit that 
 women have souls or enter Paradise, is absurd;^ as also 
 the idea, hardly reconcilable therewith, that its Paradise is 
 sensual. With all the external joys familiar to the Arab, 
 as in all apocalyptic promises, highly colored pictures and 
 symbols are used to attract the tastes of the worshippers; 
 yet IMahomet, as elsewhere, subordinates the passions to 
 the moral law. 
 
 " How happy shall be the people of the right hand ! in extended 
 shade by flowing waters and with abundant fruits, unfailing and un- 
 forbidden." "And they shall have wives of perfect purity, and abide 
 there forever." - 
 
 Even Hallam admits that Mahomet did not rely on 
 sensual inducements for the spread of his system. ^ Where 
 have the sexes been placed on a more perfect religious 
 equality than in the following passage of the Koran, — 
 
 " The men who resign themselves to God, and the women who 
 resign themselves, and the men and women believing and devout, 
 and the men and women patient, humble, fast-observing, alms- 
 giving, chaste, — for them has God prepared forgiveness and a rich 
 reward." * 
 
 That the common idea of the influence of the Koran 
 on the condition of woman is exaggerated, at least, ap- 
 pears from the testimony of careful observers like Stanley 
 Poole, who says that " in many important senses a Turkish 
 woman has more liberty than an English, being in her 
 home perfect mistress of her time and her property." 
 Similar and even stronger testimony is given by Geary, 
 Urquhart, Farley, and De Amicis, to the freedom and pu- 
 rity of woman in Turkey.^ The comparative infrequency 
 of prostitution in Mahometan countries has been generally 
 
 1 Sura iv. 123 ; xiii. 23; xl. 44; xlviii. 5, etc. 2 Sura Ivi. 20-30; ii. 23. 
 
 3 MiM/e Ages, chap. vi. 4 Sura xxxiii. 35. 
 
 s Poole: Modern Turkey, chaps, iv. xv. Geary: Travels through Asiatic Turkey. 
 Urquhart : The Spirit of the East, i. 252. De Amicis : Turks 0/ Consta7itinople, pp. 212- 
 226. Farley: Modern Turkey {iSjz^, p^. 116-130. 
 
602 ISLAM. 
 
 observed ; and several recent travellers have ventured to 
 show conclusively how great are the compensations for 
 the evils of Mussulman polygamy in the regulation and 
 restraint of the passions. That the institutions of the 
 Koran are no bar to the progress of woman, appears not 
 only from the immense influence always accorded to her 
 in public and private affairs, but from positive decisions of 
 Imams like Abu Hanifa, that women could lawfully exer- 
 cise the functions of a judge, and from the special honor 
 in which they were held in the splendid days of Sara- 
 cen Spain and under the great caliphs of the East, before 
 the theologians began to preach the sinfulness of earthly 
 love. 
 
 It was not to be expected that Mahomet should attempt 
 the abolition of slavery. He did what had been the ex- 
 tent of Christian work in that direction by many mitigating 
 precepts and laws,^ forbidding the separation of parents 
 and children, putting the duty of kindness towards the 
 slave on the same ground with the claims of " kindred 
 and neighbors and fellow-travellers and wayfarers ;" ^ en- 
 couraging manumission, and therewith the gift of " a 
 portion of that wealth which God hath given you ; " and 
 above all, forbidding sensual uses of a master's power over 
 the slave, with the promise of divine mercy to the wronged.^ 
 To free a slave is the expiation for ignorantly slaying a 
 believer,'* and for certain forms of untruth. As we have 
 already seen, the whole tenor of Mahomet's teaching 
 made permanent chattelhood or caste impossible ; and it 
 is simply an abuse of words to apply the word slavery, in 
 our sense, to any status known to the legislation of Islam. 
 From the slave-laws of the early caliphate, by which a 
 fugitive fleeing to Islam became free, and the child of a 
 slave-woman followed the condition of the father, while 
 
 ' Kremer: Cttlturgesch. tintcr d. Khalifen, ii. loi. 
 
 * Sura iv. 40. ^ Sura xxiv. 33. ^ Sura iv. 94. 
 
MAHOMET. 603 
 
 the mother became free at his death, and the slave could 
 contract for his freedom, and part of the poor-tax went to 
 his rehef, down to the institutions of modern Mussul- 
 man countries, which allow the bondman of to-day to 
 become the grand vizier of to-morrow, the status of slaves 
 has stood for a political incident, not a state of nature, nor 
 even for a degraded race.^ 
 
 It would be wrong to omit here the peculiar tenderness 
 of Mahomet towards the brute creation. The horse and 
 camel, true protectors of the desert man, inherit the mys- 
 tic honors torn from broken idols and cowering super- 
 stitions. Islam admits into Paradise the dog of the Seven 
 Sleepers, the whale of Jonah, the calf of x^braham, the ram 
 of Ishmael, the mule of the Queen of Sheba, the ox of 
 Moses, and the ass of Mahomet, — a broader recognition 
 of the humbler forms of life and service than that of the 
 hero of the Hindu epic who refused to enter heaven with- 
 out the company of his faithful dog. 
 
 From the hour of mental anguish when he struggles to 
 escape the conviction of an immeasurable divine task, to 
 that in which, his message borne and his mission fulfilled, 
 he dies, old before his time, amidst mourning companions, 
 distributing his few goods to the poor, and murmuring of 
 Paradise and the prophets before him, — when the devo- 
 tion of Omar will not suffer him to believe the great life 
 has departed, and he rushes out wildly to deny that it is 
 so before the people, so that Abu Bekr has to silence him 
 with the admonition, " Know ye that the Prophet was but 
 a man, and has died like the rest; but let those who trust 
 him understand that God can never die," — through all 
 that is hard and semi-barbarous, self-delusive, and seem- 
 ingly self-seeking in his thinking and doing, there is 
 indubitable evidence of an absolute sincerity and an 
 almost equally absolute power, natural enough thereto, 
 
 1 Kremer : Culturgesch. dcs Orients unicr d. Chalifen, ii. 18. 
 
604 ISLAM. 
 
 of attracting, convincing, and controlling men and things. 
 His consecration to his great idea was not less perfect 
 than its necessity to his age ; and its compulsion utilized 
 his virtues and his faults by a force of tendency beyond all 
 measurement. He stands as the truest type of that great 
 phase in the evolution of religious belief, — faith in author- 
 itative private revelation from a divine sovereign Will, — 
 whose good and evil alike are now rapidly becoming su- 
 perseded by a higher. And of this faith Mahomet was 
 the truest type among all Semitic prophets and religious 
 founders, because he alone in his own lifetime vindicated 
 its practical and political demands. Accordingly, his per- 
 sonal history will be found to associate itself more readily 
 than those of other representatives of the class with our 
 experience of the new phase of religion to which the old 
 faith in positive revelations has given way. 
 
 His purely historical character; his simple humanity, 
 claiming only to be a man among men and an imperfect 
 instrument of the truth ; his intense realism, avoiding all 
 mystical remoteness; his rejection of miracle; the thor- 
 oughly democratic and universal form under which his 
 idea of the divine monarchy led him to conceive the rela- 
 tions of men ; the force of his ethical appeal ; his reliance 
 on the voice and pen, and his strenuous endeavor for 
 peaceful interpretations of a religious ideal with which 
 his own history is the most perfect evidence of his incom- 
 patibility, — all affiliate Mahomet with the modern world. 
 These elements of positive monotheism are predictive of 
 humanitarian science. The passion of Islam for science 
 for five centuries, and its prodigious influence on intellect- 
 ual progress, are not accidental ; they came in the natural 
 development of the Prophet's faith in the unity and order 
 of the universe and the uses of this present world. These 
 are foundations of science ; and only the principle of per- 
 sonal Will throned above them became a barrier to liberty 
 
MAHOMET. 605 
 
 and progress, especially in its human analogue of a des- 
 potic caliph or sultan. It is for these reasons that Islam 
 has been the entering wedge for civilization among lower 
 races. The doctrine of one God and one Prophet, speak- 
 ing in strict moral edicts of unlimited authority, without 
 pretence of theological mysteries, offers a comparatively 
 easy step out of barbarian rites and superstitions. Un- 
 encumbered by speculative modifications, and moving with 
 the tremendous fanaticism of the full sense of direct reve- 
 lation, it has proved, especially among the tribes of Asia 
 and Africa, capable of doing what no other positive re- 
 ligion could do in lifting the lowest members of the human 
 family into the paths of brotherhood. But this is only a 
 part of its achievement. Fertile in splendid epochs of 
 civilization, in every form of free speculation, and in 
 noble endeavors after the largest unities and sympathies 
 of faith, and adapting itself to more varied forms of race 
 and culture than any other religious proselytism, it well 
 deserves the honor accorded it in the declaration of Ori- 
 ental scholarship, that " there is no grander landmark in 
 history." ^ 
 
 It is not my purpose to follow the fortunes of Islam in 
 detail. It interests us at present only as interwoven with 
 the history of Iranian religions, and thereby, in a larger 
 point of view, as illustrating the connection betAveen re- 
 ligions of personal Will by revelation and that universal 
 form of religion which is being shaped out of free science, 
 philosophy, and faith, — the worship of Cosmic Order, Unity, 
 and Law. Islam is the ultimate and consistent expression 
 of that earlier basis of authority which we have been tra- 
 cing through its phases as the Iranian ideal to its abstract 
 logical perfection in the Koran. Whatever has succeeded 
 Islam on that line of belief is an impure intermixture and 
 transformation of the original idea by the contact of other 
 
 - Cust: Linguistic and Oriental Essays, p. 129. 
 
6o6 ISLAM. 
 
 tendencies, ethnic, secular, and wholly antagonistic in their 
 direction to its theory of origin and authority. Yet to this 
 more rational philosophy of religion the pure monarchical 
 idea was the transition. It was the purest conception of 
 unity possible till this should be reached. 
 
 Intense as its germination was in Semitic Arabia, Iran 
 was really its natural field of development. The study of 
 the conditions to which it was subject after the conquest 
 of the Persian empire, is of the highest historic value ; and 
 it is one which, indicating the necessities involved in re- 
 vealed monotheism and its steps over into a rational faith, 
 has, so far as I know, never been pursued. The great 
 works of Sprenger, Weil, and Kremer, invaluable as his- 
 torical researches, do not touch this point of view, save as 
 affording worthy material for its illustration,^ To this we 
 shall now devote our attention. 
 
 We have found that one inevitable result of the idea of 
 revelation by Divine Will through the prophet or media- 
 tor, whether pretending to infallibility or otherwise, has 
 been his elevation into that supreme dignity to which his 
 representative function legitimately points ; so that he 
 either becomes God, or is, under some superficial dis- 
 tinction, practically inseparable from God. If this was 
 not the case in Judaism, it was because the law of Moses, 
 as the expression of Jahveh and his will, was not made 
 known at once by a single prophet, as Christianity and 
 Islam were supposed to be, but was the slow product of 
 national experience and foreign influence; and its mono- 
 latry could not be ascribed to one person, although the 
 later priestly construction of the national literature strove 
 hard for that end. Therefore Judaism became the wor- 
 
 ' It should be said that the work of Kremer (Herrschende Ideen d. Islam) has by 
 far the most claim to philosophical breadth of any thus far offered to the public; yet its aim 
 is not to cover the relations of special religions to the law of their development. 
 
MAHOMET. 607 
 
 ship of the Law, rather than of Moses or the prophets. 
 Moreover, the apotheosis of a rehgious revelator must 
 depend in large degree on the promulgation of his word 
 being speedily followed by a speculative and mystical 
 period in its development; and this period was not possi- 
 ble for the Hebrews until after the return from Babylon, 
 and the conscious reconstruction of the religion in a very 
 un-Mosaic manner. In Christianity, on the other hand, the 
 conditions of the age favored an immediate commence- 
 ment of the idealizing process ; and the Will of God, as 
 revealed in Jesus, rapidly became the divinity of Jesus 
 himself. We shall now observe the same process i.ii the 
 kindred religion of Islam. Here, also, the Person above 
 was soon inevitably merged and lost in the Person or 
 Persons below. 
 
 Incarnation of the Personal Power, or Powers, of the 
 universe in a human will was of course familiar to Asiatic 
 races and religions. Buddhism carried it everywhere in 
 its northward and westward march. The Persians had 
 long called their chiefs gods. Brahmanism embodied it 
 in its priesthood, every member of which was himself a 
 Brahma. But that identity with Deity which belongs to 
 its human organs reaches its complete form only in pure 
 monotheism, where the unity of the original makes the 
 process of human representation more simple and clear. 
 It is for this reason that Islam, with all that horror of 
 "joining gods with God," which was expressed by Ma- 
 homet, has been a hive of anthropolatry at every point 
 of its history. This fact is of the utmost importance, 
 as showing by the full confession of revealed religion 
 itself the necessity of a principle more universal than its 
 worship of a personal consciousness, which involves this 
 localization and confinement of the ideal in powerful 
 human personalities, or in what historical conditions have 
 caused to appear as such. 
 
6o8 ISLAM. 
 
 In Islam the process began with the first establishment 
 of the Arabs on the great rivers of Asia in the idealization 
 of Mahomet himself. It was continued in the worship of 
 All ; later in that of the twelve Imams; and still further in 
 the immense hagiology of subsequent times. 
 
 Such is the first form under which these limitations of 
 the class of religions now before us were apparent in Islam. 
 There is also a second form. It is the concentration of 
 aspiration, discussion, and momentous purpose on purely 
 personal questions ; in other words, on the rights of oppos- 
 ing claimants for religious honors. The relation of such 
 facts to the law of historic development, which is merging 
 " revealed religion " in the higher recognition and use 
 of human reason in the discovery of truth, is at once 
 obvious. 
 
 I. Iran, it will be remembered, is pre-eminently the land 
 of hero-worship. Its god-kings of Assyria and Babylon, 
 its homage to Cyrus, its cultus of Alexander, its admira- 
 tion of the Sassanian Ardeshir and Nushirvan, made it 
 natural that Mahomet should be greeted as the Star of 
 the West, and that in less than ten years the whole em- 
 pire should have submitted to his sway. That wonderful 
 achievement was due to an idealizing imagination rather 
 than to mental or moral assent. It was the immense 
 transformation wrought by Persian intellect on Arabian 
 zeal and passion, that made of the desert-born creed an 
 all-constructive and enduring power. 
 
 The apotheosis of Mahomet began very early, not- 
 withstanding the strong reaction that opened against him 
 in Arabia immediately after his death, and the succession 
 of the Omeyyad family (his personal enemies) to the cali- 
 phate. The sound sense of Abu Bekr, the overshadowing 
 military and organizing genius of Omar, the historical 
 tastes of Othman, the extraordinary manliness and free- 
 
MAHOMET, 609 
 
 dom of the leaders whom the Prophet had drawn around 
 him, — "no mere fanatics, but men of practical insight, 
 and susceptible of lofty impressions," ^ — could not pre- 
 vent the operation of a tendency involved in the very 
 substance of his claim. The teacher who always assured 
 his followers, in all humility, that as prophet he had no 
 higher function than to transmit a book written in heaven, 
 nevertheless did assume an exclusive commission, which 
 absorbed his human nature in the supernal splendors of a 
 divine election. He claimed to have been authenticated 
 by prophetic scriptures as conveyor to mankind of saving 
 truth direct from the mouth of God, who spake indeed in 
 the first person familiarly from his lips. How could he 
 fail to be regarded as the intercessor for his followers, and 
 even for his nation as such, at the judgment and before the 
 throne? The legend relates that Moses asked Allah to 
 reward the good deeds of Jews tenfold, and to grant them 
 other prerogatives over other races; but Allah replied, 
 " These privileges are accorded only to believers in Ma- 
 homet, in whose name even Adam prayed to me." ^ 
 Soon his intervention became necessary for the attain- 
 ment of Paradise even by the good, and his name had 
 magic virtue to the same end. Even at this day the pil- 
 grim at his grave cries,^ " Thou must be our advocate ! 
 Intercede, oh ! intercede for us whose sins have broken 
 our backs ! " Mahomet had said, " Whoso visits my grave 
 shall have my good word with God ; " ^ and even Al Ghaz- 
 zali, who allows the tradition that he had in his lifetime 
 deprecated the future use of his grave for an " idol stone," 
 is careful to observe that he had afterwards instituted this 
 very cult.^ The name of the Son of Abdallah is men- 
 tioned, like that of Christ in Christian churches, in every 
 
 1 Sprenger: Appendix to chap. v. See his account of them in detail. 
 
 * Weil: Biblical Legends, 151. 
 
 8 Kremer : Die Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam, p. 284. 
 
 * Braun : Geiiidlde d. Islam, p. 435. "J Kremer : CuUurgesch., etc., p. 296. 
 
 39 
 
6lO ISLAM. 
 
 prayer. In every feast it is the benediction, in every peril 
 a charm, in every grief and loss a victory over death. 
 He had divided the Jordan by a word ; he had pierced 
 the veil that hides the innermost heavens. It was denied 
 that he had, even in youth, been an idolater, or had ever 
 wavered in his faith. His own brief reference to a vision of 
 visiting Jerusalem was magnified at once into the amazing 
 myth of Borak and the night journey to heaven.^ He was 
 dogmatically pronounced sinless and infallible, the black 
 drop having been taken from his heart by Gabriel ; and 
 the world was held to have been created for his sake. 
 
 In Arabia, the free spirit of the desert refused this per- 
 sonal homage, as the Jewish Christians refrained from a 
 like homage to Jesus. The ablutions, fasts, and organized 
 forms of his religion could take no root in the Arab's semi- 
 nomadic life, and never supplanted the old usages, which 
 sprung from the nature of the country and immemorial so- 
 cial needs.^ But in Persia the apotheosis went on without 
 restraint. The emanative Light, before creation deposited 
 in Adam's loins, shining on the brows of patriarchs, ex- 
 panded into twenty spiritual oceans, and avoiding contact 
 with impure persons or with even the shadow of a doubt, 
 
 — down to its perfect incarnation in Mahomet, and re- 
 solved at last into the ideal Mahomet of the panthe- 
 istic Sufis, in whom, as in Jesus, multitudes of devotees 
 were absorbed, bearing his very stigmata on their persons, 
 
 — corresponded essentially, if not in detail, to the Logos- 
 Christ, the Gnostic ^Eons, and to the God-Christ of the 
 later saints and mystics. This mythic exaltation, with the 
 innumerable cosmic miracles afterwards gathered about 
 his birth, was no imitation of Christian precedents, as 
 
 ' Ibn Hisham, from Ibti Ishak, i. 196-202. 
 
 2 Yet even in Arabia there was his genealogy to work on ; and nothing in this kind ever 
 equalled that of Mahomet's "mothers," traced back for ages, to the number of five hundred, 
 every tribe supplying an ancestress, with names and branches past number. Sprenger : Intro- 
 duction, chap. xlii. 
 
MAHOMET. 6ll 
 
 Sprenger constantly intimates, but the natural evolution 
 of this form of religious belief.^ In the Persian " Hyat-ul- 
 Kulub " his ancestry are immaculate ; Satan shrieks and 
 falls headlong at his advent, and Paradise is suffused with 
 joy. He is the crown of humility, forgiveness, and every 
 virtue, and his presence converts the worst to humanity. 
 So commanding are his beauty and majesty that no one 
 could resist them, and no unjust person could stand before 
 him till right had been done. The elements do him hom- 
 age as he walks the earth, and the angel of death must ask 
 his permission to cross his threshold to bear him to Para- 
 dise. He is lord of life and death, and his body transcends 
 their laws.^ Such the transfiguration of the man who 
 would hear of no miracle but his revealed word. It is 
 true that the Shiite prayers are generally addressed to 
 Allah, and the Prophet and his Imams are but remembered 
 in them ; but we shall see that the spirit, as we have just 
 described it, must interpret the form. 
 
 No doubt his real personality had much to do with this 
 swift exaltation. The oldest traditions testify at least of 
 the awe and love of his companions. They say of Omar, 
 that he cut a Moslem in two who appealed from the 
 Prophet's judgment to his own.-^ One of his companions 
 avowed that he should prize one of the master's hairs 
 beyond all the gold and silver in the world.* His wife 
 Ayesha is made to describe him as more beautiful than a 
 veiled virgin ; as sympathetic with every mood or experi- 
 ence, even with the sports of little children ; as making 
 every one in a company think that he was his most favored 
 guest; as incapable of withholding anything he had from 
 those who had need.^ No Moslem ever doubted the 
 
 * Wackidi, p 36. ^ Merrick : Hyat-ul-Kiduh, pp. 36, 37. 
 3 Tales of the Kalifihate, p. 256. 
 
 * Wakidi, p. 279. Muir: The Life of Mahomet and History <y A/a ;«, Introduction, 
 XX ix. 
 
 ^ See Muir: The Life of Maho?net, etc., ii. 305. 
 
6l2 ISLAM. 
 
 authenticity of his dying words, — " By the Lord, verily no 
 man can lay hold of me on any matter. I have made noth- 
 ing lawful except what God hath made lawful, nor permitted 
 anything which He hath in His Book forbidden."-^ 
 
 The line of personal traditions in which the divinizing of 
 the Prophet has gone on, began at a very early period, in 
 fact immediately after his death.^ They had become enor- 
 mous in quantity by the second century of the Hegira, 
 though not more enormous or monstrous than those which 
 have grown up around the Christ and his saints. The ra- 
 pidity of their growth is illustrated by the fact that a com- 
 piler who died in the year 58 of the Hegira had collected 
 three thousand five hundred from the immediate hearers 
 of the Prophet, as rehearsed to their scholars. All the 
 companions and contemporaries of Mahomet were busied 
 in collecting them.^ Before the age of the great Abbaside 
 caliphs the science of tracing traditions through long series 
 of verbal witnesses had become perfected, orthodoxy being 
 of course the chief test of authority. Of the multitude of 
 those examined by the great scholar Bokhari, only one in 
 one hundred and fifty stood the test of his conscientious 
 inquiries ; and of these, " modern criticism would certainly 
 strike out half." Yet the patient honesty with which the 
 millions of a later growth still have been wrought over by 
 scholars to form the orthodox Siinna is at least respecta- 
 ble, and Sprenger does not despair of reducing the inter- 
 minable series of authorities to something like historical 
 value. The prodigious energy of these constructions is 
 shown in the earliest biography of the Prophet now extant, 
 that of Ibn Ishak, transcribed and enlarged with great care 
 by Ibn Hisham, dating as far back as the early part of the 
 second century of the Hegira.'* The endless minuteness of 
 
 * See Muir: TJie Life of Maho7net, etc., lii. 277. 
 
 * Sprenger: Das Leben, etc., iii. 61. s Ibid., iii. Ixxxiii., bcxxv. 
 
 * Translated by Weil (1864). See also Sprenger (Zeitschr. d. Devtsch. Morgenl- 
 Geselhch.i xiv.). Leben Moh. iii. Ixi. Mohl: Vingt-sept ans, etc., ii. 627. 
 
MAHOMET. 613 
 
 detail, both in names and events, given us in this simple 
 and unadorned chronicle, the treasures of contemporary 
 poetry gathered around it, the natural appreciation of 
 parties and situations, and the impartial hearing to their 
 diverse reports, combine to produce upon the reader an 
 impression of reality which is only weakened by the quiet 
 confidence of the author in miracles as accredited facts. 
 Not only is the supernatural power of the Prophet in full 
 play thus early, even to the sacredness of his person from 
 attacks, and the homage of nature to his presence, but 
 the adoration of him has gone so far that his com- 
 mon replies are quoted as the words of Allah, not as his 
 own ; and his whole speech and conduct from birth to 
 death, as well as his Koran, are evidently regarded as 
 divine. The energy of the mythopoetic tendency in thus 
 rapidly divinizing the founders of positive religions, espe- 
 cially Semitic, becomes the more astonishing when we 
 consider how entirely the amazing capacity of the Arabs 
 for accurately remembering oral testimony, as well as the 
 conscientious use of it in Ibn Ishak's researches,^ failed 
 even to retard the process. Nothing at all comparable 
 to this check upon the traditional imagination existed in 
 the Jewish mind during the infancy of the Christian rec- 
 ords ; so that the rapid formation of a deific halo about 
 the head of Jesus became a fortiori a fact of easy and 
 natural explanation. 
 
 So fruitful of personal theopoetic traditions is a revealed 
 religion, that myriads of Mussulman teachers were conse- 
 crated to the study of this oral personal wisdom, and every 
 corner of Islam was ransacked in the search thereof, until 
 it came to be reckoned that the Prophet had been sur- 
 rounded by one hundred and twenty thousand companions, 
 so that not a word of God that fell from his lips could 
 have been lost.^ The parallel with Christian traditionalism 
 
 * Mohl, !. 490; ii. 445, 2 Hishftm's Ibtt Ishak, i. 113, 192, 290. 
 
6l4 ISLAM. 
 
 may be carried further; and in the later work of Wakidt, 
 and still more in the latest and best of all, that of the great 
 chronicler Tabari, who has been called not very accurately 
 the " Livy of Islam,", there is a certain degree of reaction 
 towards a rationalistic point of view. 
 
 The rage for deification naturally acts in a monotheis- 
 tic religion by concentration, once for all, upon one per- 
 sonal representative, as in the Christian worship of Jesus 
 as God. Yet in Islam it takes a continuous form, always 
 creating new objects. The reason lies in the character of 
 the races with which this religion had to deal ; in its being 
 imposed on polytheistic antecedents in these races, who 
 were accustomed to find a deity in every fresh phenomenon 
 of human power. Thus the polytheistic instinct perse- 
 veres even through the change by which every newly 
 deified man becomes the manifestation of one and the 
 same God. In Christianity this tendency was contravened 
 by an intense Aveariness of polytheistic systems in the 
 Roman world, and a profound desire, everywhere, of politi- 
 cal, social, and religious unity. The worship of saints, 
 relics, and the papal power, indeed, represented it in an 
 inferior degree ; but, however practically intercepting and 
 absorbing the worship of the one God and the one Christ, 
 it did not theoretically invalidate the exclusive identity of 
 the Only Begotten with the Father. Herein the worship of 
 personal Will was less logical than in Islam, which knew 
 no Only Begotten, and did not attempt to control the 
 supreme purpose of incarnation within numerical limits. 
 In Asia, in the seventh century, the freedom of Divine 
 Will, instituted by polytheism, could not so easily be con- 
 fined. Persia was not content with lifting the chief of 
 prophets to the side of God. For five centuries the pro- 
 cess was repeated, with teachers of new sects; soldiers, 
 party leaders, veiled and unveiled prophets, rebellious 
 sheikhs, — more open paths for Deity through human 
 
MAHOMET. 615 
 
 organs than in the Buddhist Avatirs. The thoughtful stu- 
 dent will recognize in both these tendencies — alike in the 
 extreme limitations of the one and the extreme caprices 
 of the other — the inherent inadequacy of the worship of 
 personal Will. While in both the essential identity of 
 the human and divine is dimly foreshadowed, and uncon- 
 sciously pursued in these highest of revealed religions, 
 they are but " the motion toiling in the gloom." 
 
 All, the son-in-law of Mahomet, his first great convert, 
 his dearest companion, was the legitimate heir of his inspi- 
 ration, if there was one; but the intrigues of the harem set 
 him aside from the caliphate. To three successive exclu- 
 sions from his rights he submitted with the quiet dignity 
 of a great man. Nevertheless, the disputes among the 
 Arab leaders as to the succession not only broke out into 
 war, but immediately, both in Egypt and Irak, resulted in 
 exalting All into an incarnation of God. The object of 
 this adoration did not hesitate to rebuke it, and to pun- 
 ish the leaders. The famous Fatimite dynasty in Africa, 
 founded in due time upon the divinity of Ali, shows 
 how vainly men resist the logic of beliefs. Oriental fa- 
 miliarity with the godhood of priests and kings, religious 
 enthusiasm for the prophetic function which Mahomet 
 had observed in Ali, his martyrdom at Kerbela by the 
 treachery of companions, combined with the persecutions 
 of his friends by the Omeyyad caliphs, and with the posses- 
 sion of many noble traits, to exalt this personal devotion 
 into positive worship, until in Persia, where all these influ- 
 ences had peculiar force, the name of Ali became the sym- 
 bol of the national faith. The principal sects in that coun- 
 try are Shiite, or Aliite, in distinction from the Western 
 Mahometans, who hold to the Siinna, or traditional law, in 
 the interest of the three Omeyyad caliphs who had super- 
 seded Ali. In their hostility to All, the Omejyad family^ 
 
 * Belonging to the old first families of Mecca. 
 
6l6 ISLAM. 
 
 represented a reaction against the authority of the Prophet 
 and his Hne, — or rather an aristocratic resistance at the 
 outset to his popular institutions, which showed itself at 
 once in their free dealing with the Koranic laws.^ Not- 
 withstanding their discouragements from Damascus, the 
 Aliites became powerful enough in Persia to overthrow 
 their Syrian enemies, and by help of the disintegration of 
 sects and parties to substitute the Abbaside dynasty. And 
 though this change brought little immediate advantage 
 to themselves, it was succeeded by a long period of inter- 
 necine civil wars and dynastic strifes, through which the 
 worship of this human god and his descendants became a 
 mighty religious cult, and at last the very heart of Iranic 
 faith. The Dabistan enumerates eighteen sects of this 
 creed, and reports a Sura in All's honor, believed by them 
 to have been struck out of the Koran by Othman when he 
 fixed the canon of Islamic Scripture.^ Analogous emo- 
 tions to those which Christians felt for the cross of Christ 
 were, and still are, centred in the martyrdom of All's son 
 Hosein, who, as suffering humanly for man, holds the full 
 place of his father in Persian gratitude and love. This 
 dramatic sympathy is the religion of modern Persia.^ It 
 is easy of course to deny all analogy between this " man 
 worship " and the Christian adoration of Jesus. But these 
 earliest Imams who inherit the divinity of Ali were sup- 
 posed to have really dropped their human natures, and to 
 have been as truly absorbed into the essence of Deity as 
 it was possible for the second and human person of that 
 Christian trinity in unity to be, which could not be recog- 
 nized in the spiritual arithmetic of the Mussulman, These 
 Imams (Holy Ones) were regarded as perfectly immacu- 
 late before the end of the first century of the Hegira.* The 
 
 1 Renan : Etudes d'' H istoire Religie^ise, p. 264. 
 
 • Dabistan, ii. 366-36S. 
 
 3 See Braun : Gemdlde d. Islam, p. 20. 
 
 * Kremer . Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam, p. 375. 
 
MAHOMET. 617 
 
 line of apotheosis reaches through Persian history, ulti- 
 mating in the expectation of a now hidden member, who 
 is to come in clouds and hghtnings out of his sechision, to 
 judge, redeem, and rule the world, as immediate represent- 
 ative of All himself.^ 
 
 To follow All-worship would be to recount the intricate 
 and endless tale of the Persian sects, which the purpose 
 of this work requires us to present only in a few of their 
 general bearings. The important fact is, that so com- 
 pletely did this new idealization efface the old primitive 
 faith, that the Shiites became in general anti-Islamic, and 
 flung aside the system of the founder, even to the Meccan 
 pilgrimages, as completely as the Papacy set aside the 
 early form of Christian worship. They have their own 
 pilgrimages to the tombs of their own martyrs at Kerbela, 
 where the Persian holds it his supreme bliss to be buried 
 at their side.^ For the old Arab rites they substitute 
 stated lamentations for Hosein, and theatrical shows of 
 his death, at which passions are aroused more vehement 
 than ever attended the Mystery- Plays of Christendom, and 
 not unlike the orgiac rites of Semitic fire-gods. Some of 
 these sects cursed the Prophet himself for the sake of Ali. 
 A somewhat philosophical form was given to the line 
 of Imams by the theory of a continuous revelation from 
 age to age, according to the educational needs of man- 
 kind. Al Hakim (Al Mokanna, the " veiled prophet " of 
 Khorassan, as famous in Western poetry as in Oriental 
 politics) was a propagator of Imam divinity in its strong- 
 est form, associated with Buddhistic dogmas, with Iranian 
 independence, and with politic and even deceitful seclu- 
 sion from the sight of his followers, and placed himself 
 confidently in the sacred line. Ismailism, a phenomenon 
 of immense political influence, pursued the same track, 
 counting seven Imams, all included in the unity of Allah. 
 
 1 Kremer, p. 377. Dabistan, iii. 36S. - Kremer, p. 375. 
 
6l8 ISLAM. 
 
 Abdallah ibn Maimun, an eclectic preacher holding an 
 esoteric system woven of Gnostic, Manichaean, Buddhist, 
 and Parsi elements, repudiated even the descendants of 
 All in their turn, in order to carry the doctrine of a hid- 
 den Imam to its farthest limits. His initiations led up 
 gradually to the rejection of all prevailing systems, retain- 
 ing only their common idea of incarnation in some form; 
 and his sworn bands of missionaries went out to hold him 
 forth to the Oriental world as the Word of God. Out of 
 his movement came the Karmates of Irak in the ninth cen- 
 tury, who worked it up into a socialistic and predatory 
 crusade against Islam from their fortress in Nabathean 
 Irak.^ They pillaged Mecca and terrified the caliphate of 
 Bagdad, and, after a crusade against all thrones but that of 
 their expected Imam, established the Fatimite dynasty 
 of Syria and Egypt. From this in turn came a number of 
 self-instituted incarnations, — such as Hakim (A.D. 1021), a 
 strange compound of the philanthropist and savage, whose 
 return the Druses are still expecting; and Hasan-Cabbah, 
 the pessimistic and unscrupulous founder of the sect, named 
 from their use of hashish HasJusJiin, which in the mouth 
 of the French crusaders became Assassins, with the signifi- 
 cation of murderers, — a hierarchy of nihilists sworn to 
 passive obedience and the martyrdom that awaits the pro- 
 fessional murderer of all eminent foes, yet combining with 
 this religious rage of the desert most of the personal and 
 social virtues in which all the rationalistic Arab schools 
 abounded. The Assassin fortress of Alamut had its line 
 of incarnations, its protests against the formalism and 
 superstition of the older faith, until a reaction brought 
 the sect back into the fold, but without preserving them 
 from the retributions of another and mightier human god, 
 
 1 Dozy, pp. 246-278. There is a story that he cheated his followers, who insisted on see- 
 ing hi<n, by placing a row of mirrors in the hands of his wives, so that their reflections of the 
 sunlight overwhelmed the beholders, who fell prostrate under the dazzling glory, crying out, 
 "O God, this light of thine suffices us." — Vamb^ry : Kkorassan, pp. 49, 50. 
 
MAHOMET. 619 
 
 the Mongol Hulagi^, who swept away Alamut and its Ht- 
 erary stores as it had burned its own Hashishin books. 
 
 The Nosairts, who are called by Gobineau the most im- 
 portant sect of Persia, adore Ali as the supreme God, crea- 
 tor of Mahomet himself! They repudiate historical Islam. ^ 
 They take a solemn vow not to reveal the mystery of 
 their trinity, in which All is the father, Mahomet the son, 
 and Salman the spirit. All's body, like the Docetic and 
 Koranic Christ's, is phenomenal merely; but his symbol 
 is wine, before which they fall, and know no other Kebia 
 than his invisible face. The catechism declares that Ali 
 created man, and is ruler of life and death ; that in Ma- 
 homet he was hid as seed, and that he has appeared on 
 earth seven times. After giving his genealogy, it gives lists 
 of hierarchies and worlds, rites of communion and mass, 
 similar to the Christian, and finally a store of those high 
 moral precepts which run like a golden thread through 
 all the phases of personal or will worship, Avhether of a 
 more or less superstitious kind.^ The most violently intol- 
 erant of these human deities were, like Al Hakim, famous 
 for kindness to the poor and for open ears to all the needs 
 of their subjects. They were teachers of a Puritan mor- 
 ality, which had no respect for the persons of priests or 
 kings.2 To the Christian believer these doctrines ought 
 not to seem blasphemous, nor the good ethics illegitimately 
 born, since they come, like their own, out of the premises 
 of revealed religion. 
 
 But All and his Imams do not exhaust the list of Islamic 
 apotheoses. Every sect invariably makes its founder a form 
 of Deity, and every religious reformer has ended by becom- 
 ing in this sense a gate (bdb) of God.* From the second 
 century of the Hegira, when Babek in Persia cut adrift from 
 
 1 Salisbury (American-Oriental Journal, viii. no. 2, pp. 235, 241, 245, 267) gives the 
 Nosairian ritual in full, from Mahometan authors. 
 
 2 Zeitsckr. d. Deutsch. Morgeiil. Gesellsch., iil. 302-310, where the Nosairian catechism 
 is given, translated by Dr. Wolff. 
 
 2 Kremer : Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam, p. 74, * Braun, p. 284. 
 
620 ISLAM. 
 
 Moslem tradition into a kind of universal religion com- 
 pounded of preceding ethnic faiths, and passed for a new 
 Buddha, the substitutive process has gone on, until Ma- 
 homet himself is probably the least worshipped of the 
 masters of Moslem faith. Every one hastens to the em- 
 pyrean, the religious norm of one sovereign Will. Al 
 Hakim permitted the Cairo university to proclaim his 
 divinity at the age of fourteen ; and Hamza, his Persian 
 follower, renewed the claim in his behalf only to announce 
 himself as the Word, and Mahomet as the spirit of Evil ! ^ 
 The Yezids, ultra Shiites, who are rather unfairly called 
 Devil-worshippers merely because they take the precaution 
 to put themselves right with the chief of fallen angels, who 
 is by and by to be redeemed and exalted by Allah, adore 
 their sheikh, who said, " I who sought truth became truth, 
 and they who possess truth shall be as I." Mirza All 
 Mohammed, of Shiraz, founder of Babism (1842), the politi- 
 cal pantheism of the Persian masses at the present time, 
 declared, " He who would know the way to God can go 
 only by me." ^ His preaching against the Mollahs and 
 their traditions resulted, contrary to his desires, in armed 
 rebellion ; whence came terrible persecutions, and a record 
 of heroic martyrdom unsurpassed in history, in which his 
 own (1849) was the most noble and touching instance.^ 
 His pure theology and ethics, — in many respects the crown 
 of Sufism, — his justice to the social relations, and to a love 
 of order and peace which rebuked the fanatical passion of 
 his followers, were really an advance on the Koran itself; 
 and it seems by no means without reason that the Prophet 
 is wholly ignored by him in the interest of these higher 
 spiritual conceptions. Characteristic of all these identifi- 
 cations of the prophet with his God was their political 
 absolutism. Mahomet and the Hebrew prophets assumed 
 this in virtue of their commissions, even though holding 
 
 ^ Braun : Getnalde d. Islam, pp. 132, 133. 2 Vc\^,^ p. 178. 
 
 ' See a tuU account of the Bab, in Gobineau's Religions de PAsie Centrale, p. 267. 
 
MAHOMET. 62 1 
 
 themselves to be merel}- human instruments of the Infinite. 
 But the Hakims and Ismails and Babs and Imams could 
 not be less than masters of this world, if not in their own 
 view, certainly for their devout followers. How could it 
 be otherwise, under religious conceptions wholly analo- 
 gous to those of politico-monarchical Will ? It was, in 
 fact, through political evolution that such conceptions were 
 reached. Where the only notion of law is the royal 
 will, that type must be carried up into the ideal sphere, 
 and God, with his incarnations, becomes simply " King of 
 kings." As the death of an Oriental ruler threw an em- 
 pire into utter confusion and peril, so the incarnated pres- 
 ence of God's will in all human affairs was a permanent 
 necessity, which could take no other form than that of an 
 earthly autocracy. The tendency to this identification has 
 always been irresistible. The Roman Caesars were dei- 
 fied as soon as they became politically omnipotent, and 
 Augustus could not prevent it in his own case, though he 
 certainly seems to have attempted to do so. It was the 
 same with the Egyptian Pharaohs. Deification was but 
 the reverse side of monarchy. It was an easy play of the 
 imagination, too, for the court-poets of the East to trans- 
 form a man for whom the world was indubitably made 
 into the God by whom it was made. For the thinker, it 
 was only to change the final cause into the efficient. 
 " Mo'izz," says the Fatimite poet of his prince, " is the 
 cause of the world ; he is healing ; outflow of the essence 
 of the spiritual sphere; intercessor; reflected light of 
 God." ^ It was difficult for the free Arab individuality 
 to come under such influences; and apotheosis, as we 
 have seen, was not in its line. But the old monarchies 
 of Egypt and Persia, and even the ruder tribes of Asia 
 and Africa, had been for a long time under political con- 
 ditions most favorable to the process. Judaism was a 
 
 1 Kremer i^Zeltschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geseilsch., xxiv. 491, 492). 
 
622 ISLAM. 
 
 democracy like Arabia; yet its culmination, after Ezra, 
 was in a priestly theocracy. Its God was after the image 
 of a human autocrat, owing to its intense monolatry of 
 personal Will. This, moreover, caused it to bring forth 
 perhaps the most complete illustration of human diviniza- 
 tion in all ecclesiastical history, as soon as its own purely 
 individual religious fruit was watered by Aryan political 
 experience.^ In truth, the superiority of law to person in 
 religious, as in political, conceptions, is a modern idea, — 
 a result not of Christianity, but of that mighty complex of 
 relations, inward and outward, which we call civilization. 
 It rests on the pure love of truth as truth, not as a revela- 
 tion of individual Will nor as the gift of a special teacher. 
 It rests on the development of intuition, science, and in- 
 tercourse, bringing all exclusive volitions to the level of 
 universal human nature and inviolable law. 
 
 It may seem that evidence enough has been given 
 of the natural expansion of belief in personal revelation, 
 through the very conditions of a free divine Will, over an in- 
 definite number of human representatives thereof, who not 
 only practically intercept the worship of a Supreme One, 
 but — what is of more moment — foreclose the universal 
 relation of mankind to the substance of truth and good. 
 But we must not forget that the very extent of this ex- 
 pansion is a hint of the aspiration of the human faculties 
 toward the highest spheres of thought and desire. For 
 this reason, as well as to show how inevitably even a 
 monotheistic faith falls into the interception above men- 
 tioned even while theoretically forbidding it, we shall try 
 to point out the extreme development of Islamic anthro- 
 polatry. 
 
 1 Dr. C. P. Tiele {Histoire Comparee des Ancienfies Religions, etc.. p. 492) makes the 
 astounding assertion that " Jesus never appealed to a special inspiration of God, nor pre- 
 sented his word as tlie word of God" ! It is enough to ask, how could he have failed to do 
 so, under the circumstances of his education and ideal? The statement shows how hard it is 
 for the highest perception of historical laws to escape the prejudices of a positive religion. 
 
MAHOMET. 623 
 
 Nothing seems more incongruous with the sublime con- 
 ception of Allah in the Koran than a positive adoration of 
 saints, their tombs and their miracles. Mahomet indeed 
 availed himself of the honors traditionally paid by the old 
 Arab tribes to the graves of their heroes and bards. He 
 allowed miraculous gifts to the earlier prophets, though 
 not as a mark of superiority, since the Koran was above 
 all miracles, the very speech of God. He firmly maintained 
 the separation of the human from the divine by an immeas- 
 urable gulf, which it was blasphemy to deny or ignore. 
 
 " The Jews say ' Ezra is a son of God,' and the Christians say 
 * The Messiah is a Son of God.' They are like the infidels of old : 
 God do battle with them I Fain would they put out His light in their 
 mouths, taking their teachers and monks and messianic Son of Mary 
 for Lords beside God. But there is no God sive God." ^ 
 
 Nothing could be more explicit. Yet not only were the 
 Prophet's earliest companions made into divinities, as ca- 
 liphs, — not only, as we have seen, did the great leaders of 
 sects inevitably become objects of worship, — but the pro- 
 cess is repeated, down to the narrowest local experience, 
 in tens of thousands of thaumaturgic ascetics, whose tombs 
 are temples, and who live after death as real representatives 
 of God. It seems to be as natural to the strict monotheism 
 of the orthodox Moslem as to the pantheism of the Sufi, 
 whose very purpose is to reach absorption in the whole 
 as the true end of existence. In both forms it is equally 
 common for the devotee to proclaim his own arrival at 
 this identity with God, and to receive the worship which 
 is its due. 
 
 Nor is this anthropolatry, from which the master would 
 have shrunk in horror, imposed by a priesthood. Islam 
 recognizes no such right or power in any class to grant 
 official canonization, still less to deify mortal men. The 
 instinct is spontaneous in the worshipper, and rests entirely 
 
 ^ Sura ix. 31, 32. 
 
624 ISLAM. 
 
 on merits and miracles in the holy man. The process lies 
 wholly outside of the recognized rights and forms of the 
 Church. It is, then, the unconscious following out of some 
 logical necessity in the conception of God. It is the prac- 
 tical result of the theism of personal Will, a strictly human 
 quality identified with the Supreme. So intense is this 
 thirst for union of the actual with the ideal, that a great 
 sheikh is quoted as saying that it is " the highest joy to 
 believe in all who describe themselves as in union with 
 God, even when the claim is known to be false." ^ Every 
 age has had its perfected saint, " whose foot is on the neck 
 of all the righteous ; " ^ perhaps living unknown, and pur- 
 suing some humble trade. Every town moreover has its 
 centre of superstitious legend. Mussulman Egypt is cov- 
 ered with local myths, and names shaped on divinizations 
 analogous to those of mediaeval Catholicism, in which the 
 same logical development took place. Morocco swarms 
 with adored Sheikhs, — literally, " elders; " Marabouts, — 
 literally, "bound to God; " Sherifs, — nobles, descendants 
 of the Prophet; and Mokaddems, — representatives.^ The 
 Oiialis, ascetic missionaries of Islam for three centuries 
 among the Kabyles of the Tell, whose influence has been 
 in every way civilizing in faith and customs, established 
 individually a dominion over these tribes amounting to 
 theocracy. They are credited with ubiquity and omnipo- 
 tence, and with instant command over the laws of Nature 
 and the lives of men. In the legends these saints * often 
 appear as flames of fire, which slowly resolve themselves, 
 on approach, into human bodies in attitudes of rapt de- 
 votion ; while intruders are rooted to the ground, or sent 
 away perfumed with incense from heaven. Prayers are 
 regularly addressed to them, and vows of absolute obe- 
 
 * See instances in Goldziher's article (Rev. d. VHist. d. ReHg-, ii. pp. 268-281). 
 
 2 Kremer, p. 173. ^ Burton's Pilgrimage, ii. 10. 
 
 * See a full account of these saints, with their literature, in Colonel Trumelet's work, 
 Les Saints du Tell, iSSi, Introduction, xix. ; also pp. 163, 174, 217. 
 
MAHOMET. 625 
 
 dience assumed.-' Their tombs are protected by their mi- 
 raculous presence against invasion, and become shrines 
 for their constant responses. In hfc and death all time is 
 transparent to them, and their will is God's.^ The neces- 
 sity is too strong to endure the invidious distinction of 
 sex: the records of Islam everywhere show equal honors 
 to sainthood, male and female. Nunneries and cloisters, 
 often founded by women, asylums for the divorced, are un- 
 der the divine protection of female Marabouts and Oualis. 
 Old pagan tombs and temples and feasts have been trans- 
 formed, as in Christianity, into shrines and rites of an 
 apotheosis, not so far remote, after all, from their original 
 purpose. Late researches by De Tassy in India, and 
 Renan in Phoenicia, show that Islam and its kindred, Chris- 
 tianity, have easily accepted even the old heathen names 
 of saints ; and in many Mussulman countries the passion 
 for divinization has kept alive the oldest forms of animal 
 service.^ 
 
 All this was resisted in every age by rationalistic theists 
 and by sceptics. But from the indignant declaration of 
 Omar, when he kissed the black Kaaba, that he did so 
 " only because the Prophet had set the example, but that 
 it was nothing more than a dead stone after all," down to 
 the heroic iconoclasm of the VVahhabees, extinguished in 
 blood by Mehemet All in the present century, every pro- 
 test split on the rock of an invincible necessity. 
 
 Wahhabism was the most significant revolution ever 
 known in the history of Islam. It was the revival, after a 
 thousand years, of the old Arab individuality, conservative 
 
 1 Trumelet : Introduction, xxi. - Ibid., pp. 19, 245. 
 
 3 Goldziher, p. 290-300. Thus the Mussulman feast of Noruz (New Year) is grafted on 
 an old Iranian solar festival, and turned (precisely like the change of the old December liber- 
 ties into Christmas) into a commemoration of All's choice as successor of tlie Prophet. The 
 Mussultnan pilgriins to Egypt have adopted into their processions the sacred cats of Bubastis. 
 The old serpent-cult of Egypt still remains under Islam. The love of trees, fishes, and 
 other creatures is transmitted in Mussulman forms. Samson has passed into All, and St. 
 George into Al-Chidr. — Goldziher, pp. 308, 309, 316, 318, 322. 
 
 40 
 
626 ISLAM. 
 
 simplicity, and natural scepticism, — of that reluctance of 
 the desert tribes to receive Koranic institutions, or an in- 
 termixture of foreign cults, which demanded at the out- 
 set, " Why should we practise ablutions, who have no 
 water ; or give alms, who have no money ; or pray to the 
 Kaaba, when we have the rising sun? " Wahhab, it has 
 been said, played the part of Luther in Islam. He did 
 more. He went back to the freedom of natural reli- 
 gion. He was no full believer in the Koran, or in the 
 Prophet, — certainly not in the orthodox sense of belief. 
 He denounced all mediatorship by prophets and saints, 
 and all worship at their tombs. He assailed the Siinna 
 traditions, taught the primitive democracy of the desert, 
 noted the human limitations of Mahomet, the sinfulness of 
 all rites but those addressed to the Supreme. He waged 
 deadly war against wine, tobacco, rosaries, and all vanities 
 of dress and fashion. He denounced the vicious and sense- 
 less habits of the Mecca pilgrims, the silly legends about 
 the graves of saints. He renewed the old thunders of the 
 Prophet among his people, and with like results.^ The 
 traditional dignitaries set themselves to silence him, and 
 soon drove the new puritans to take up arms. A new 
 destruction seemed to impend over Islam, like that which 
 Mahomet had brought on the empires of his day. Bagdad 
 trembled, and the tomb of Hosein itself was overturned. 
 Mecca was captured, and a general sweeping off of mosques 
 and trading-stalls around the Kaaba succeeded ; the black 
 stone itself was broken up, and the ornaments stripped 
 from the Prophet's tomb. Saiid, the chief in this cru- 
 sade, had great aims for the regeneration of his people. 
 Like Mahomet, he was obliged to fight his way through 
 to security for all; and so far as he found power, he es- 
 tablished order and peace. Jews and Christians were 
 unmolested, on condition of tribute. But nothing could 
 
 1 Dozy : Histoire de Plslam, p. 417. 
 
MAHOMET. 627 
 
 keep those wild Semites loyal to settled government. This 
 leader compelled obedience to law, broke up the old blood- 
 revenge and settlement of disputes by war, enforced re- 
 conciliation, and abolished the right of rogues to find 
 refuge by fleeing to the tent of a chief He tried to 
 drive the masses to mosque with sticks, and, an earlier 
 Savonarola, made a bonfire of Arab abominations, — pipes, 
 ornaments, and wine-vessels. It was an appeal to the best 
 instincts, and for a while they responded bravely to the stu- 
 pendous task of reforming the world. He was an expert 
 soldier; only a tinge of avarice lessened his power; no 
 treachery, like that of the Egyptian semi-barbarian, who 
 finally marched to destroy the new faith, can be laid to 
 his charge. Orthodoxy proclaimed a holy war against the 
 iconoclast, and Wahhabism went down before the cruelty 
 and cunning of Mehemet Ali, who succeeded only through 
 the untimely death of its chief. But Wahhabism survives, 
 because the free Arab lives. It wilf again rend Islam with 
 its war on saint and relic worship, — the settled media- 
 torialism of a thousand years. But it will always find the 
 orthodoxy of a revealed religion its deadly foe, because 
 these and the like anthropolatries are the inmost necessity 
 of such belief.^ 
 
 II. The second point I proposed to consider in the 
 evolution of Islamic religious monarchism is, that just as 
 its sentiment became absorbed in personal apotheosis, so 
 its speculative and even ethical controversy has centred in 
 questions of personal claims. The statement is equally 
 true of matters human and divine. Its disputes related 
 either to the right of certain individuals to rule human 
 thought and conduct, or else to predestination and free- 
 will in the relations between God and man considered as 
 distinct personalities. The great war between the cali- 
 
 1 See Braun : Gemdlde,eic.,x>.29^. Crichton : Arabia. Burckhardt : A^i?/^^, etc., vol. ii. 
 
628 ISLAM. 
 
 phate dynasties of the Omeyyades and the Abbasides was 
 about family rights rather than any difference of prin- 
 ciples. Shiite and Sunnite did not substantially disagree 
 in doctrine. The question was whether Ah or Abu Bekr 
 was entitled to the prophetic succession ; and this strife for 
 men has rent Islam into hostile halves from the beginnins" 
 to the end of its history, as if to show how surely the wor- 
 ship of personal Will, even in the form of absolute unity, 
 breaks up into practical Dualism and intense antagonism 
 of wills, by its very nature. The subordinate sects have 
 battled in the same way over the claims of the Prophet 
 himself; and the history of free thought in Islam con- 
 stantly revolves around the disposition to repudiate him as 
 the centre of faith, and either to substitute some nearer 
 name or names, on whom the age or region is supposed 
 to depend, or else to come out by a strong reaction into 
 a more perfect conception of the unity of the universe 
 by pantheistic absorption into an impersonal substance 
 (Sufism).^ Christian history presents precisely similar 
 phenomena, being founded on essentially similar notions 
 of Deity. Its incessant strifes reveal the same enormous 
 proportion of purely personal questions, beginning with 
 the controversy of Jew and Gentile in the early Church 
 over the humanity of Jesus, passing on into the battle 
 of ages over his essence, — whether of God or like God, 
 whether one or twofold, whether involving two wills or 
 one only, — and then, after all this was officially and dog- 
 matically settled, resolving themselves into the rival claims 
 of metropolitan bishops to represent His will in church 
 government; a dispute no sooner settled than the pontifi- 
 cal rule was broken up by fragmentary protestant papa- 
 cies, ending only in the sublime revolt of historical and 
 intellectual science against the assumption of a central 
 head, historical or ideal. 
 
 ' Kremer, p. 172. 
 
MAHOMET. 629 
 
 As soon as the Prophet's death left the theology of Islam 
 free to pass from an instinctive into a reflective stage, it 
 divided on the question of predestination and free-will; 
 in other words, the will of a Supreme and the will of a 
 finite man. And this strife continued till the former was 
 firmly established as the orthodox norm of faith. It was 
 the natural parallel to the strife of Augustine and Pelagius 
 in the Christian Church. The predestinarianism of the 
 Koran was intense ; and all the vehemence of Mahomet's 
 appeals to free moral choice could not hide his behef that 
 he was the mere instrument of Divine will, and his demand 
 that others should regard themselves as no less so.^ But 
 the independence of the Arab, the intellectual energy of 
 the Persian, the dialectical rationalism of the Graeco-Syrian 
 schools of Basra and Nisibis, were never suppressed by the 
 absolutism of Allah and his Koran. Not for a moment 
 during the history of Moslem supremacy has the protest 
 against it ceased. Constantly unsuccessful, for reasons 
 already given, it has been as constantly renewed, — the 
 half-conscious struggles of a higher ideal by and by to 
 be made good. 
 
 The Omeyyad caliphs, born of an anti-Mahometan 
 stock, were indifferent, literary, luxurious. They encour- 
 aged free thought, and treated the orthodox church as the 
 Medici treated the Church of Rome. It is true they fell 
 into an opposite policy ; but the Abbasides, who succeeded 
 them, renewed the free movement, and led it to its culmi- 
 nation. While Europe lay in mental night, the Mahome- 
 tan world was called on to repudiate bibliolatry and even 
 revelation. The horror of an orthodox Spaniard at the 
 intermixture of schools and religions which met his eyes 
 at Bagdad in the tenth century, came to its climax when he 
 found that no arguments were allowed to be drawn, in these 
 
 ^ See Salisbury in American Oriental Journal., viii. no. i, — an excellent and suggestive 
 
 article. 
 
630 ISLAM. 
 
 discussions, from the Koran or the Prophet. When the 
 reformers had the upper hand, which frequently happened, 
 they knew how to follow the track of all battling theo- 
 logical sects, applying the same inquisitorial and barbarous 
 penalties which they had experienced from others.-' But 
 these are eclipsed by the stories in which the history of 
 Moslem free thought abounds, of heroic rebukes and 
 resistless arguments hurled by its confessors at tyrannical 
 priests and kings, to their utter confusion and shame ; and 
 the " Acta Martyrum " of Islam would not pale beside 
 the noblest records of self-sacrifice for conviction in any 
 age. 
 
 Earlier discussions, such as those of the Kadarites and 
 Jabarites, were soon merged in the rise of the great sect 
 of Motazelites (separatists), in the eighth century, who 
 represented free thought for many centuries. They began, 
 indeed, by so firmly holding to the unity of God that they 
 denied the existence of divine attributes, because as so 
 many distinct forces they would imply that He was not 
 one, but many.^ They did not deny predestination as a 
 necessity of infinite Will ; they rejected free-will in man 
 in any sense inconsistent with this. Yet they stood for 
 human rights as against the awful objective God of the 
 Koran. They asserted that human reason was the judge 
 and source of knowledge. They protested against much 
 Koranic anthropomorphism, and sought to reconcile faith 
 with a more rational conception of Deity. The Kharijites 
 and others opposed the sinlessness of the Prophet. The 
 Morgites rejected the idea that God had an unlimited right 
 to save or punish to all eternity.^ They repudiated the 
 dark views of life and death prevailing in the Koran, and 
 afterwards expounded in a Calvinistic form by Ghazzalt. 
 
 ' Dozy : 3fussi4l/n. d. P Espagne, iii. iq. Kremer, p. 241. 
 
 2 See account of their doctrines, with abundant quotations, in Salisbury's article, Atneri- 
 can Oriental Journal, vol. viii., no. i. 
 
 * Especially Sura liii. See Kremer, p. iS-20, 28. Kremer, p. 156. 
 
MAHOMET. 63 1 
 
 They rejected eschatological machinery, like Es Sirat, the 
 Bridge of Judgment, the Final Balance, and the Resurrec- 
 tion of the Body.^ The protests of these sects developed 
 into a positive religious philosophy, which for a long while 
 antagonized the orthodox belief in predestination, and that 
 worship of the Koran as an tmcreated form of Divine will 
 to which the Prophet had certainly given the first impulse. 
 They combined with their refusal to personify Divine attri- 
 butes insistence that man could fulfil the moral law even 
 without the intervention of prophetic revelation. They 
 had no mercy on miraculous traditions, Hebrew or Arab, 
 or on the immoralities they detected even in the life of 
 the Prophet.^ Ibn Koteybah carries back the beginnings 
 of this liberty of thought to old Arab times, but the his- 
 torical founders of it were the Persians Hasan and Wasil ; 
 and so great was its influence in cultivated Iran, that 
 princes and even caliphs were among its followers, — 
 among them Mamun, Rashid, and Mansur. Under these 
 caliphs it produced a true revival of letters analogous to 
 the European Renaissance, accompanied, we may believe, 
 by similar frivolities and extravagances of license.^ Even 
 after the school had lost its influence at court, its liberty 
 animated the whole intellectual life of western Iran. The 
 gist of the Motazelite protest was directed against the au- 
 tocracy of Divine Will ; against an arbitrary determination 
 of the soul's destiny, which superseded the moral law, 
 Nazzam, a teacher of the ninth century, distinctly taught 
 that Allah had no power to create the evil actions of men, 
 or to determine their future rewards and punishments by 
 any other test than their natural moral deserts. He went 
 so far as to deny volition in any known sense to the Divine 
 perfection, which is superior to choice.* The Shah-Nameh 
 
 1 Kremer, pp. 271-273 ; also 20-28. ^ Ibid., p. 148. 
 
 2 Dozy, pp. 199-207. Crichton : Arabia, chap. xii. Palmer: Haroun Al Rashid. 
 Kremer, p. 149. 
 
 * Steiner: Mutazilitun, 5, 56, 57. Kremer, p. 31. Salisbury, as above, p. 158. 
 
632 ISLAM. 
 
 says, " The world is God's work, by virtue not of volition, 
 but of His nature." ^ Ibn Abbad even maintained that 
 God could not be self-conscious, because that would imply 
 a distinction in Him of the knower and the known ; nor yet 
 conscious of things apart from Himself, which would in- 
 volve dependence on an outward world. Both Jubbat and 
 his son taught that " since God has prescribed duties to 
 man, He is bound to perfect human reason, to come to 
 the support of human ability and free-will, and do away 
 with their weakness in respect to His commands." ^ These 
 and many other similar Motazelite theses, drawn by Pro- 
 fessor Salisbury from the writings of the historian Sharas- 
 tani, combined with the earnest affirmations of free-will, and 
 refutations of the orthodox dogma of eternal decrees, strik- 
 ingly suggest that the system of belief against which the 
 later free-thinkers of Christendom have found themselves 
 obliged to contend is not specially revealed in Christian- 
 ity, as its supporters conceive, but is evolved by necessary 
 logic out of the very substance of anthropomorphic wor- 
 ship. Later Motazelite teachers fell into predestinarian 
 tendencies, even though maintaining opposition to other 
 anthropomorphic beliefs. The controversy went through 
 various attempts at reconciliation between human con- 
 sciousness and sovereign foreknowledge and decree, which 
 of course proved vain, and ended in the triumph of abso- 
 lutism. The reasons for this issue were partly political ; 
 but the invincible recurrence to Fatalism claimed its own 
 at last from every true Mussulman. 
 
 But the absolutism of which we speak is not to be con- 
 ceived as unaffected by the struggle with the opposite 
 principle of liberty. Fate, in the Mussulman mind, as the 
 Koran itself fully shows, is as far as possible from sup- 
 pressing the spontaneity of instinct or will. No Scriptures 
 are more intensely moral, no history more replete with 
 
 1 Salisbury, p. 164. 2 ibid., p. 170. 
 
MAHOMET. 633 
 
 heroism, personal independence, enthusiastic zeal, than 
 those of Islam. For the sense of necessity has, besides 
 the outward, also an inward side ; it attaches not to the 
 edicts of a Divine Will alone, but to the moral impulses and 
 convictions, the patriotic and humane instincts. In pro- 
 portion as its forces are absorbed on the Iminan side, they 
 become an unconscious antidote to the logic of absolute 
 religious monarchism. They back the calls of duty, valor, 
 love, with an infinite pressure. They are not a master's 
 edict, but a prestige and prophecy beyond fear. We 
 have seen that fate is a factor in the noble pantheism 
 which, instead of subjecting man to Nature,^ lifts man and 
 Nature at once into godhood, and makes him capable of 
 the most sublime virtues. It is equally true that the most 
 effective force in moral and intellectual culture is that kind 
 of necessity which consists in the invariable sequence of 
 cause and effect, — at once the guarantee of scientific 
 truth and the knell of all dire chimeras of supernatural 
 volition. Necessarian freedom, if not in its scientific yet 
 in its moral forms, has certainly proved a mighty counter- 
 action for Islam to the predestinating Will in which the 
 personal worship of Allah has been most strongly in- 
 trenched. It is a foregleam of the religion of inviolable 
 law. 
 
 It was after ^ hundred and fifty years of this Motazelite 
 strife that orthodoxy succeeded, by its control of the 
 phraseology of religious tradition, in condensing into sys- 
 tematic form that modified anthropomorphism, resting on 
 the revelations of a creative Will and their reception with 
 blind faith, which the Koranic logic required. At the 
 close of the ninth century of Christianity (883-935 A. D.) 
 Ashari of Basra gave Islam its great Confession, or cate- 
 chism.^ He defined the crucial point of God's relation to 
 
 * See the Author's India, chapter on " Pantheism." 
 
 * See Kremer {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch, Morgenl. GeseUsch., xxxi. 166-169). 
 
634 ISLAM. 
 
 His attributes in a purely homoousian manner, and denied 
 the Motazelite idea of his amenability to the moral law, 
 
 " God must not be held to be the absolute goodness, but rather the 
 absolute king. The Koran, as His word, is uncreated, though the 
 Prophet and his language are created. Creation is from nothing, by 
 His will, without change in His consciousness. Even his predictive 
 knowledge, out of which predestination proceeds, is without effect on 
 his experience." 
 
 Two centuries before Ashari, however, substantially the 
 same system was evolved from the idea of the Koranic God, 
 and its rehabilitation after ages of controversy showed that 
 its very early origin was entirely legitimate.^ 
 
 But Ashari's Confession pointed forward to a greater. 
 Every positive religious system finds the representative of 
 its logical results, from whom its permanent creeds pro- 
 ceed, by whom its historic values are made effective. He 
 is one who, having passed through the contending phases 
 of protest which it involved, rests at last in the natural con- 
 sequences of its central principle, and adopts them in pure, 
 unquestioning faith. This is Buddha's relation to Brah- 
 manism ; it is Augustine's to Christianity; it is Luther's to 
 Protestant bibliolatry; it is Ghazzali's to Islam. The most 
 famous Moslem teacher of his time, contemporary of Fir- 
 dusl, a leader in the schools of Bagdad, Damascus, and 
 Nishapur, Ghazzali passed in his experience" from the spirit 
 of Descartes to the spirit of Bossuet, from intellectual 
 scepticism to supernaturalistic faith, from the appeal to 
 consciousness to the appeal to revelation. Yet the very 
 name of his great work indicates that by his time ortho- 
 doxy had absorbed what it could not ignore in the lib- 
 eralism of two centuries, and was attempting to recon- 
 cile the natural and supernatural, as modern Christian 
 philosophy has tried to do, as not inconsistent parts of 
 one great system of divine Will. His " Revival of Re- 
 
 * Kremer, p. 40. 
 
MAHOMET. 635 
 
 Hgious Science " is in many respects a resort to the mysti- 
 cism which readily covers any desired interpretation of 
 rcHgious phraseology. He praises wisdom as far higher 
 than mere belief, and opposes the fanatical dogmatism 
 which rejects all rational inquiry; while he supplements 
 the limitations and uncertainties of reason by a prophetic 
 intuitive faculty above experience, by which the absolute 
 trust of the Sufi is to be reached. At the same time he 
 protests against that excessive and final form of absorp- 
 tion in God which most of the Sufis pursued.-^ 
 
 It might seem from this that Ghazzali had some glimmer 
 of those transcendental necessities of thought which con- 
 dition experience instead of proceeding from it, and are 
 the foundation of all scientific processes whatever. Yet 
 his faith is based, after all, on the failure of the human 
 element and the externality of the Divine. " God made 
 reason, and said, ' Go forward,' and it went forward ; ' Go 
 backward,' and it went backward."^ Metaphysics were 
 nothing but the handmaid of revelation ; the analytic 
 philosophies of his day were the bane of truth ; he scouts 
 mental certitude and denies the principle of causality, for 
 which he substitutes a direct action of Deity.^ God has 
 human faculties, without human limitations or organs ; and 
 creates by pure will all good and evil, works and ways 
 and issues of man, all in a perfect justice and wisdom, 
 which are in fact definable by his will alone. He adores 
 the Koran, and insists strictly on its rites ; thinks the Kaaba 
 will one day wake and bear witness with eyes and tongue.* 
 So necessary is response to the reading of the prophets, 
 that a hearer should force himself to seem moved when he 
 is not so, and cultivate the gestures that his heart does not 
 
 ^ See E dmburgh Review for April, 1S47, p. 183. 
 
 ^ Ihja, analyzed by Hitzig {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Geselhch., vii. 177). 
 ^ Renan : A verroes, pp. gS, gg. 
 
 * Hitzig {Zeitschr. d. Deulsck. Morgenl- Geselhch., vii. 172-1S0). Franck : Did. d. 
 Science Philos., — " Alzazel," p. 608. Kremer, pp. 45, 46. 
 
636 ISLAM. 
 
 prompt, in hope that they will at last come of themselves.^ 
 Nevertheless, his ethics, when they do not touch theology, 
 are pure and noble. 
 
 " Knowledge is a joy for its own sake, and will ever receive rever- 
 ence from men." 
 
 " Where is the equal of a true friend ? While thy relations wait to 
 divide thy goods after thou art gone, the friend will be mourning for 
 thee, meditating on what thou hast been to him, and praying for thee 
 in the night, while thou sleepest in the ground." 
 
 Mahomet said, " When a man dies, people say, ' What has he left 
 behind ? ' but the angels say, ' What has he sent before ? ' " 2 
 
 " No wild horse needs a firm rein more than thy soul ; the wise 
 agree that heavenly joy can come only by the renunciation of earthly." 
 
 " For the spirit, sorrow is better than joy.'' ^ 
 
 Ghazzali's precepts on personal independence, on moral 
 discipline, on self-purification, on practical kindness, and 
 on the culture of the young, are creditable to his mind and 
 heart. He denounced the immoral and useless lives of 
 the Kadis of his line. The history of his solitary strug- 
 gles, his dumbness, his wanderings and gropings for ten 
 years, ends, as with many thoughtful natures on whom 
 a positive religion has a constitutional hold, in his finally 
 casting himself absolutely into its arms. In him, as in 
 most, the grip of such a religion is usually most effective by 
 its terrors concerning death and a future, which are seen 
 in the fearful light of a sovereign Will. Ghazzali devel- 
 oped the warnings of the Koran on this subject, long be- 
 fore him rejected by the Morgites and others, into a dread 
 picture of the agonies of dying sinners, which has left its 
 doleful echoes in all true Moslem souls.^ 
 
 With the triumph of orthodoxy, signalized by the work 
 of Ghazzali, — of which the modern orthodox say that 
 " were all other works lost, Islam could be restored from 
 
 1 Kremer, p. 130. 
 
 ^ Hitzig {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgetd. Geselhch., p. 182.) 
 
 ^ Ibid., pp. 185, 1S6. * Ihja, quoted in Kremer, p. 271. 
 
MAHOMET. Qt^'j 
 
 it alone," — began the age of persecution. Creation by- 
 Will, predestination, eternity of Scripture, reason sunk in 
 revelation, were the shibboleths by which every man should 
 live or die.^ Motazelites and all other heretics were put to 
 the fiery trial. Kadir and Motawikkil in Bagdad (1017- 
 1018), and Mahmud in Ghazni, proved their God supreme, 
 above mental freedom or morality, by bloody reaction- 
 ary edicts against both, — true counterparts of their own 
 political despotism. 
 
 In Spain, the same logical necessities were developed 
 more rapidly than in the speculative East. The com- 
 promise between Islam and Christianity, inevitable in that 
 country, did not render either party less intolerant within 
 its own sphere. But in spite of the burning of books 
 and the banishment of philosophers, a rationalistic reac- 
 tion occurred even in Spain. There were sects in the 
 eleventh century that taught religious impartiality, and 
 even a kind of agnosticism. Others reduced all religions 
 to efforts of man's ethical nature to reach truth, and made 
 its laws the sole bases of knowledge.^ They had large 
 glimpses of universal religion. Great writers, like Ibn 
 Badja, Ibn Tofail, Ibn Roshd, flourished in those palmy 
 days of liberty, and felt the terrors of their departure. But 
 the intolerant clergy of Christianity had their counterpart 
 in the orthodox Mollahs, who ruled thought with the iron 
 hand of their canon law, committed the free philosophical 
 works of Eastern thinkers to the flames, and denounced 
 even the orthodoxy of the Eastern world with holy horror. 
 Al Ghazzali himself was excommunicated, and his book 
 burned for its attacks on the theological hair-splitting of 
 the canon law.^ A puritanic reformer, whose followers 
 came to Spain from the Berber tribes of Africa in the 
 twelfth century, had proclaimed himself a Mahdi in the 
 usual manner, beginning with miracle and ending with 
 
 1 Kremer, p. 43. - Dozy, p. 356. ^ Ibid., 367. 
 
638 ISLAM. 
 
 persecution. These sectarians founded in the twelfth cen- 
 tury the dynasty of the Almohades, whose bigotry quenched 
 the splendors of the great times of the Omeyyades and 
 Almoravides of Cordova. For thinkers like Averroes and 
 Maimonides, orthodox Islam had no more toleration than 
 orthodox Christianity; and both alike made of Spain a 
 vast inquisition for extirpating freedom of thought.-^ 
 
 The Motazelite controversies in Persia are easily ex- 
 plained by the continuities of religious history. In the 
 collision and intermixture of Oriental beliefs in that coun- 
 try at the time of the Mussulman conquest, this great pro- 
 test of rational thought against the orthodoxy of Koranic 
 revelation was inevitable. It was by no means of Semitic 
 origin. The Semitic mind of itself had little tendency 
 to philosophy or logic ; and its immense services in this 
 direction throughout the Middle Ages were due to its 
 focalizing and kindling effect upon the Greek, Syrian, Per- 
 sian, and Latin, — in other words, the Aryan elements with 
 which it came into contact. Rationalism could hardly find 
 root in the personal monarchism of the Koran ; but it 
 could hardly fail to be provoked and intensified by such 
 despotic constraints. Islam, on its part, was surrounded 
 by a crowd of separatist sects, breaking forth everywhere 
 out of the free speculative spirit of Iran, representing 
 every shade of doubt, disbelief, indifference, and fanati- 
 cism, as well as of rational inquiry and mystical faith. 
 These were the issues of that spiritual ferment which had 
 followed the blending of heretical Christianity with hereti- 
 cal Parsism, of the Gnostic and the Zendik, the Manichaean 
 and the Mazdakite, sometimes expanding into universality 
 and sometimes sinking into communism and immorality. 
 Into this strife of elements Islam infused the passion of 
 monotheistic Will and personal revelation. Yet through 
 all these later products the most conspicuous force was 
 
 1 Dozy, p. 380. 
 
MAHOMET. 639 
 
 reaction against that central autocratic dogma which stood 
 armed ahke with the zeal and the sword of Islam, — Sem- 
 itic self-abnegation before a supreme master of body and 
 mind. The Motazelites soon found themselves substitut- 
 ing definitions of revelation, Koranic inspiration, creation, 
 as results of natural laws, for such as were required by 
 the orthodox theory of Divine free volitions ; in other 
 words, they proceeded to put universal reason in place of 
 personal caprice. It is curious to note that the world 
 has never seen fuller liberty of discussion on speculative 
 themes than has over and over again signalized Mahom- 
 etan rule in the East. It seems as if the confidence of the 
 great Mussulman emperors — like Akbar, Al Mamun, Al 
 Rashid — in their own doctrine of the one God led them 
 at first to imagine that bringing together the varieties of 
 human belief must result in a spiritual unity analogous to 
 that which they had eff"ected in the political sphere. It 
 proved equally impracticable in both spheres to establish 
 permanent unity so long as the autocratic basis stood. 
 Both were incessantly rent by discord. However liberal 
 the spirit of the ruler, it was inevitable, not only that every 
 question of belief should become absorbed into that of the 
 supreme rights of Divine Will over human reason, but 
 that orthodox Arabic theology should back down upon 
 the freedom it had forced into life, in its best disciples. 
 Even Hindu reformers, inspired largely by older Aryan 
 philosophy, — such as the Moslem prophets Nanak, Ba- 
 ber, and others, — all insisted on the need of an inspired 
 teacher, who should stand to the pupil in place of God. 
 In fact, orthodox Islam has striven for a thousand years 
 to escape anthropomorphism by logical subtleties and 
 large interpretations of the monarchical absolute ; yet, 
 after all, the old unlimited and unconditioned Will that 
 dictated the Koran stands fast, as root and master of the 
 moral law, and God is really an Oriental despot. Yet 
 
640 ISLAM. 
 
 even here the quahfications of arbitrary power are great, 
 as we have already seen in our previous studies of Oriental 
 civilizations. 
 
 Nothing can show more conclusively the necessity of 
 these results than the fact that the Kaldin, or Mussul- 
 man Reason {Logos), after being the inspiration of a wide- 
 spread liberalism and free discussion in the great schools 
 of Islam, was, even after the infusion of Greek thought 
 into Persian, turned, in the Moticallemin schools, into the 
 chief organ of orthodoxy in defending Semitic ortho- 
 doxy against the assaults of science,. — the very soul of 
 persecuting fires.^ In the sixteenth century Sharani, the 
 modern apostle of theological concihation in Islam, still 
 adhered to the old conceptions of God as seated on a 
 throne, of a predestinating Will, of miraculous evidence of 
 Divine commission, of revelation as higher than reason, 
 with all the mythic accessories of Koranic eschatology.^ 
 Until very recently, as was true of the Christian treatment 
 of the Bible for a thousand years and more, no translation 
 of the Koran was made into popular tongues. To put it 
 to press was forbidden as impious by the four great ortho- 
 dox sects. Nevertheless, the cry of the mind for freedom 
 has never been silenced, as our immediate purpose is to 
 show. 
 
 The force of those inherent qualities which necessitated 
 the triumph of monarchism in Islam (as they must, if not 
 neutralized from without, in every other religion of the 
 same class) cannot be appreciated without the careful 
 study of an immense accession to the resources of free 
 thought, which, though associating Islam with the great 
 world-movement of future ages by direct consequences, yet 
 proved Avholly unable to overcome the logic of autocratic 
 
 * Renan : A verroeSs pp. 105, 106. 
 
 2 Analyzed by Fliigel (Z«zV.s<:/«r. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xx. 1-48). Kremer, 
 p. 252. 
 
MAHOMET. 641 
 
 Will. I refer to the early introduction of the Aristotelian 
 writings through the schools of eastern Iran, whence they 
 spread to Spain, France, Germany, and Italy before the 
 middle of the thirteenth century. To expel this mighty 
 master of those who trust in Nature and law from the whole 
 field of study, was the great aim of Mussulman orthodoxy, 
 as it was for a long while of Christian, and for similar 
 reasons. The free-thinking Greek was understood to teach 
 eternal immanent law as the secret of divine and human, 
 of soul and sense alike, in place of voluntary creation of 
 the finite in time ; to remove predestinating Will from the 
 notion of divine perfection ; to undermine the recognized 
 grounds of that future state of rewards and punishments 
 on which the Koran rested, by uniting matter and spirit 
 in one conception, and as sides of one process on which 
 individual existence was dependent; and, finally, to con- 
 ceive Nature and man, as well as God, to be objects of free 
 and independent inquiry.^ It was seen that here was a foe 
 more dangerous than the Motazelite, because far more sys- 
 tematic, scientific, and learned. The God of Aristotle, as 
 prime mover of the universe, immaterial and unchangeable, 
 was associated with it, not as a pre-forming Will, but by 
 the law of his being as the realized perfection of that very 
 process from potentiality {dynamis) to fulfilment {entele- 
 cheia) by which each being and thing became an individual ; 
 thus, and thus only, partaking of the nature of universals. 
 While, therefore, as the sole absolute entelecheia, God is 
 in one sense completely apart from all these finite and 
 imperfect ones. He is, as that which they all pursue, the 
 inspiration and end of all being. The idea, the universal, 
 the abstract divine, is for Aristotle not like the Platonic 
 Ideas, — archetypes existing before the individual; nor yet 
 is it found by abstraction or combination of the individuals. 
 It is only in the individual, in the concrete ; it exists only 
 
 ' See Aristotle : Metaphysics, xi. 7. 
 41 
 
642 ISLAM. 
 
 as positive energy, a transformation of Matter, which is 
 its empty possibiHty, into Form, which is its essence. 
 These postulates, however unfamihar their phraseology, 
 are as far as possible from materialistic in our sense. They 
 are no more so than the Platonic philosophy to which 
 they are in some respects strongly opposed. God, with 
 Aristotle, is strictly immaterial as perfected Form, — the 
 absolute Energy of principles. Knowledge is no accumu- 
 lation of detailed sensations under the name of experience. 
 It has its " origin and end in necessary principles, beyond 
 demonstration ; apprehended by the nous without reason- 
 ing," as the condition of its own energy. This perception, 
 constantly recurred to by Aristotle, is properly translated 
 intuition} It is in the light of these transcendental pos- 
 tulates — the foundations of all genuine thinking since 
 the world was made — that the subtile duality of the soul 
 in Aristotle's system, on which there has always been so 
 much dispute, must be interpreted. He conceives the soul 
 as on the one hand a passive possibility or finite material, 
 and on the other as partaking of the " active, universal 
 intellect," which realizes itself in the same ; and, though 
 inseparable from its concrete form, is itself supremely real, 
 and the true end of all knowledge of particular beings and 
 things.^ 
 
 The practical meaning of this system for Islam was in 
 various ways a revolution. Thus, as the Divine Life can 
 be no creative and controlling Will, but is evermore simply 
 the pure perfection of all energies, so the human mind 
 can be no mere creature of such a higher Will, but is itself 
 an active energy, free to shape the matter of its inherent 
 powers into their highest individual form. As a religio- 
 philosophical ideal, the God of Aristotle, although not 
 
 ^ Ethics, vi. vi. 2 ; xii. 6. 
 
 - See Bohn's edition of the Metaphysics and Logic- Also Ueberweg : History of Phi- 
 /w(7/)/S_)/ (Eng.)) i. 160. Renan : Averroes. 
 
MAHOMET. 643 
 
 altogether beyond the confines of a self-conscious indi- 
 vidual Will, was yet an open door out of the monarchical 
 logic of a revealed religion. As the one substratum of 
 the universal and individual, He satisfied the theistic in- 
 stinct of the freer Mussulman mind, at the same time thor- 
 oughly supplanting the autocratic motive by the scientific. 
 His cosmos was an evolutional whole, a harmony of pro- 
 gressive ascents from the inorganic to the organic, plant 
 to animal, thence to rationality in man and his unity with 
 God, each grade pursuing its own natural purpose, its 
 highest possibility by the law of its own being. I am 
 tempted to picture the manifold stimulus which the study 
 of Aristotle was suited to give to the finer elements of Is- 
 lam. The reality of this world, the necessity of progress 
 in the study and use of it, neutralized those hopes and fears 
 concerning a future world by which revealed religions have 
 absorbed the interest of mankind in the distant and un- 
 known. Men could not think of essence as inseparable 
 from matter, of phenomena as containing the noitmeiia ; 
 they could not conceive of the universe itself as eternal 
 (that is, forever involved in the motive energy of the prime 
 mover), without escaping the purely passive attitude of 
 the Koranic faith towards a supernatural world. Through 
 the subtile mazes of Aristotelian psychology, the one clear 
 clew is the impulse to incessant mental achievement, to 
 self-conscious study and experience, as the end of Nature 
 and man. It was the function of Aristotle to awaken this 
 aspiration in a scientific form, to give the keys of the uni- 
 verse to the free reason of man. He turned the full force 
 of it on concrete individualities, while making their whole 
 value consist in the universal which they enshrined. What 
 could be nobler than to teach men to regard the form, the 
 end, the cause of being as the ultimate of truth, and to 
 regard the soul as the purpose of the body's existence, not 
 as its creation ; as the light from Deity, not derived from 
 
644 ISLAM. 
 
 it, but found in it; as the activity by which its phenomenal 
 Hfe, as passive and receptive, became real, and the indi- 
 vidual a force of universal law? 
 
 His searching analyses of concepts and objects, so abso- 
 lutely different from the operations of faith, enforced exact 
 thinking, and summoned to a Socratic self-study, which 
 became the light of ages, and has not yet ceased to inspire 
 philosophic thought. His encyclopedic survey of physical 
 science, terrestrial and cosmical, through spheres of con- 
 tinuous ascent, however imperfect and erroneous, pursued 
 the ideal of systematic coherence and universal unity, with 
 an interest in every minutest fragment of truth, never sur- 
 passed in the history of thought. It announced that the 
 world rests on the authority and invariability of law, and 
 that every law has inherent, commanding relation to the 
 mind of man. 
 
 The Organon of Aristotle, as it was afterwards called, 
 taught the ages to think ; his physics, to observe.^ Here 
 is indeed the true father of science, who defines it as 
 " the knowledge of things by their causes," and describes 
 doubt as the only condition of knowledge, and knowledge 
 itself as " the solution of doubts ; " w'hile they who fail 
 to " hear all adversaries," '-^ and entertain all rational sus- 
 pense of belief, are " like persons who know not whither 
 they go."^ What a reveille for every human faculty to 
 its utmost assertion and endeavor was that insistence on 
 the entelecheia, or realization of its own possibilities by 
 
 1 Lange, a thorough materiahst, if I understand him, who hates all systems that start from 
 self-consciousness {History of Materialism, i. 90), opposes (not fairly, as it seems to me) 
 Aristotle's "anthropomorphic teleology " (i- 83). Yet even Lange admits that his system is 
 " the most perfect example in history of a theory of the universe as a united and self-included 
 whole " (i. 96). It is hardly necessary to dwell on the Aristotelian identity of matter and 
 form, the universality of the latter being the final purpose of the former, in distinction from 
 the Platonic separation and even opposition of the two, as an anticipation of the modern sci- 
 entific conception of matter and spirit, of subject and object. With this direct attachment of 
 thought to Nature came initiation into the physical sciences by the hand o£ a master. See 
 also Dieterici {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Jiforgenl. Geselhck., xxxi. 118). 
 
 2 Aristotle; Metaphysics, v. i. Ethics vi. 7. ^ ibid., ii. i. 
 
MAHOMET. 
 
 every being and force ! What stimulus to the fine arts 
 was his close analysis of their mutual relations and finest 
 functions, as expansions of finite experience into universal 
 thought and feeling ! 
 
 We cannot wonder at the instinctive rejection by tra- 
 ditional supernaturalism of such a foe to the authority of 
 the Koran. No peril could be more subtle arfd incisive. 
 The self-conscious God of Aristotle was still sufficiently 
 anthropomorphic to oft"er an easy and attractive transition 
 for the Mussulman thinker from the bonds of revelation, 
 and to prompt a natural reaction to the free inquiry of 
 which he stood in such absolute need. To these attrac- 
 tions must be added the fine sense of natural limitation, 
 which led Aristotle to avoid ontological speculations, and 
 fasten the mind on fruitful positive research. Still further, 
 there was a vast and instant interest awakened in the Mus- 
 sulman world by the science of the Greeks, through the 
 fatalistic element, which might seem to forbid such inter- 
 est, but which has always played so essential a part in all 
 human progress and power. Stripped of personal caprice, 
 it is, in some form, absolutely requisite to the ideas of or- 
 der, of science, of philosophy, and must have prepared the 
 way in Islam for a sense of necessary relation, and so of 
 unity and law. 
 
 The Ethics of Aristotle had even greater dignity and fas- 
 cination than his physical and intellectual system. They 
 rest on free reason, on a natural power of obedience and 
 conformity thereto, and on the constant energizing of be- 
 lief in the form of conduct. In this only are happiness 
 and power. ^ Here, too, his method is transcendental, 
 based on the perception of necessary truths beyond dem- 
 onstration, by the intuitive reason, as the beginning and 
 end of knowledge. The origin and culture of morality 
 are thus planted in thoroughly human and independent 
 
 1 Ethics, ii. vi. lo ; i. vii. lo ; x. viii. 
 
646 ISLAM. 
 
 grounds.^ No moral action in a human sense is ascribed 
 to God, since the necessity of choice or suspense would 
 degrade his perfection. Neither do the sanctions of virtue 
 come from a future state of rewards and punishments. 
 That sublime principle of the "end in itself" as the mo- 
 tive of endeavor swept away every obstacle to the disin- 
 terestedn^s of moral struggle. Man is naturally designed 
 for moral relations. His function is to fulfil the law of his 
 being; and this function is conceived as his being's final 
 cause, yet not a result of conscious divine intent. To what, 
 then, does character appeal? To a universal ideal con- 
 science superior to the mere individual desire, being reached 
 by the fulfilment of ethical conditions by human experi- 
 ence. Thus substantially the good man is the measure and 
 rule of goodness.^ At the same time this moral standard 
 tends to coincide with the grand principle of an objectively 
 "active intellect," or truth, in God, — the really everlasting 
 life amidst the transiency of individualities.^ Has a freer or 
 nobler basis of ethics ever been devised? 
 
 Reason is the sanction of morals ; and balance, or the 
 mean between extremes, determines the specific forms of 
 virtue, — to modern thought a questionable rule, as it is 
 apparently quantitative rather than qualitative, and so not 
 sufficiently absolute for the antagonism of right and wrong, 
 in the view of Kant and others.^ Yet nothing could be 
 nobler than the practical ideals to which it led. 
 
 " Not a man, but reason, should rule ; since by ruling for self, man 
 becomes a tyrant." ° 
 
 " Friendship is in loving rather than in being loved. ... It is in 
 equality, especially between the good. ... A friend is another self. . . . 
 When men are friends, they do not need justice ; but when they are 
 just, they still need friendship." ^ 
 
 1 Ethics, vi. i. ; vi. vi. ; vi. x. Mag. Moralia, i. 35. See also an admirable article in 
 Westminster Review, January, 1867. And Grant's Ethics of Aristotle, i., Essay v. 
 ^ Ethics, iii. iv. 5 ; x. v. 14. ^ Metaphysics, xi. vii. 5. 
 
 * Grant : Ethics of A ristotle, i. , Essay v. 
 ^ Ethics, V. vi. 5. ^ Ibid., viii. viii. 4, 5 ; viii. i. 5. 
 
MAHOMET. 647 
 
 " A good man bears the accidents of fortune most nobly and always 
 suitably, as faultless as the cube." " He is brave who bears death 
 or wounds because it is honorable to do so." ^ 
 
 *' There are cases in which pardon is granted, when one does what 
 he ought not, owing to causes too strong for human nature. But there 
 are things which it is wrong to do even on compulsion, which a man 
 should undergo most dreadful sufferings and even death rather than 
 do." ^ "Suicide is cowardly, for it does not seek death because it is 
 honorable, but to avoid evil." ^ 
 
 " The magnanimous man, in the greatness of his merits, is in the 
 highest place ; but in his proper estimation ot himself he is in the true 
 mean." 
 
 " Men are most apt to be deceived by pleasure, choosmg it as the 
 good, though it is not so." * 
 
 When Aristotle says that " deliberate preference," that 
 is, real moral choice, " can only be desire of things 
 that are within our power," ^ he shows that his rule of 
 " balance " (or the mean) was simply the noble sense of 
 liberty as the fruit of right limit. It is pure spontaneity. 
 " What is done virtuously, is done without annoy ; honor- 
 able actions are for the sake of the honorable, and the 
 right act is the pleasant act." ^ Finally, to sum all, is this 
 noblest of moral affirmations : " We exist by energy, by 
 living and acting. He who has produced a (real) work 
 loves it because he loves his existence." ' Surely Semitic 
 passion, at its Moslem fever heat, may well have sought 
 the discipHnes of an ethical " balance " so commanding, so 
 wise, and so brave.^ 
 
 But what could be a more welcome relief from that 
 political absolutism in which Moslem orthodoxy centred, 
 than Aristotle's firm demand for entire mental freedom, 
 his recognition of reason as the rightful ruler? What so 
 acceptable to the early Arab instincts, or to the individ- 
 
 ^ Ethics, i. X. 7. 2 Ibid., iii. i. 8, 9. * Ibid., iii. vii. 11. 
 
 * Ibid., iv. iii. 5 ; iv. 6. s Ibid., iii. iii. 12. 
 
 * Ibid., iv. i. 6. ' Ibid., ix. vii. 5. 
 
 8 For many fine illustrations of Aristotle's ethical philosophy, see Mayor's Ancient 
 Philosophy. 
 
648 ISLAM. 
 
 uality of the Iranian genius, as those bold political specu- 
 lations in which tyranny, oligarchy, and unbridled crude 
 democracy are shown to be the worst forms of government, 
 and the end of the State is pronounced to be the good of 
 the whole ! ^ With what force must it not have appealed to 
 the thoughtful scholar of Bagdad or Basra, in Irak or in 
 Khorassan, to read in his Greek master that " authority in 
 Persia, especially parental, is founded on tyranny;" that 
 " justice is the most excellent of virtues, and is more 
 admirable than the morning or the evening star; " that 
 nevertheless " equity is nobler even than justice," ^ be- 
 cause it supplements the inequality of general laws ; above 
 all, that equity is the corrector of edicts, and higher than 
 the written law ! Even those doctrines which appear most 
 contrary to modern humanity, such as the righteousness 
 of slavery under certain conditions, the depreciation of 
 woman, and the inferiority of mechanical labor, could have 
 found no serious protest in the Islam of the eighth cen- 
 tury, as they certainly did not either in Greece in Aristotle's 
 own time or during many ages of Christianity. Their 
 seeming harshness will be much modified by the study of 
 his meaning. Thus he justified slavery only among "those 
 whom Nature had fitted to be happier in that state than 
 out of it; " only for " those who have just reason enough 
 to know that there is such a faculty as reason, without 
 being endued with the use of it."^ But even here "the 
 interests of master and slave are one ; and to govern ill is 
 evil to both the governor and the governed ; " so that " a 
 mutual utility and friendship is proper between them." ^ 
 " A slave should be trained by his master to such virtue as 
 he is capable of, not as mere servile drudgery!' ^ " And 
 if it is necessary that both sides should have some noble 
 qualities, why should one always govern and the other 
 
 * Politics, vii. xiii. ; v. vii. ix. ; vii. ii. = Ethics, viii. x. 7 ; v. i. 12 ; v. x. 4 ; v. x. 
 
 ^ Politics, i. V. * Ibid., i. vi. ^ ibj^.j 1. xiii. 
 
MAHOMET. 649 
 
 always be governed?"^ "Therefore they are wrong who 
 would deprive slaves of reason, and say that they are only 
 to follow their orders ; for slaves want education more than 
 children." ^ 
 
 From all which it is evident, to say the least, that the 
 Aristotelian ethics could have added nothing to the com- 
 paratively light and loose burdens of slavery as it has 
 always existed in the Oriental world. As healthful inspir- 
 ations for that age and for all ages, may be added Aris- 
 totle's opposition to Platonic communism, and honor to 
 the family relations ; his strong tendency to suffrage for 
 all citizens, and to making all men citizens who have a fair 
 measure of character and wisdom ; and his liberal view of 
 right governmental forms as variable with the genius and 
 qualities of States. 
 
 The dreaded influences of Aristotelianism were summed 
 up in the last and greatest of his followers, the famous 
 Ibn Roshd (Averroes) of Cordova, whose numerous writ- 
 ings, circulated throughout the Oriental world, repre- 
 sented for centuries that sceptical, anti-supernatural, scien- 
 tific spirit, out of which grew the freedom of the modern 
 Renaissance, after the bitter war against him in Islam and 
 Christianity had proved vain. Against the " renegade " 
 Ghazzali, the prime minister of Moslem orthodoxy, Aver- 
 roes expends his entire strength, answering his work 
 against the philosophers triumphantly in detail.^ To the 
 theology of personal revelation and divine autocracy 
 nothing could be more destructive than the calm, syste- 
 matic tone of Averroes, and his clear conclusions, far 
 more decided on these subjects than the writings of his 
 master. He reversed the dogma that good was good 
 because God willed it, as destroying the foundations of 
 morality. 
 
 ' Politics, i. xiii. ^ Ibid., i. xiii. 
 
 ' See Renan : Averroes, p. 167. 
 
650 ISLAM. 
 
 His philosophy of emanation, drawn from Neoplatonism, 
 verged towards pantheism, especially as providing a con- 
 tinuous chain of being between God and man, which it 
 was for man to span, not by asceticism, but by moral dis- 
 cipline and by science. His psychology struck at indi- 
 vidual immortality. His exegesis overthrew Scriptural 
 religion in the traditional sense. His free dealing left 
 nothing inviolable by science, philosophy, and free belief; 
 and he affirmed that Nature is moved by principles. His 
 large and encyclopedic thought nevertheless went further 
 towards recognizing the permanent good in traditional be- 
 liefs than that of other writers of his school. For example, 
 he allegorized in the interest of adaptation ; he claimed 
 to respect the Koran, and to be a good Mussulman. He 
 admitted Fatalism in a certain sense, though not in the 
 full predestinarian sense; recognized the control of con- 
 duct by natural laws and their continuity from the whole 
 past, which he was willing to include in the Divine om- 
 niscience. He did not even deny the possibility of revela- 
 tion, yet interpreted it as a part of the education of mind 
 on lower stages, but wholly needless to the philosophic 
 mind, — and he might have added, in the ordinary sense 
 impossible. His political theories were Platonic, and 
 amidst many fantastic ideas contained protests against 
 militaiy despotism in all forms, and in fact against all 
 forms of tyranny, especially that of priests. Above all, 
 he claimed for woman equal breadth of capacity with man 
 in all spheres, and considered the narrow sphere to which 
 she had been confined as the real reason for her actual 
 inferiority, even moral.^ 
 
 Arabic thought has never reached beyond the mind of 
 Averroes. He summed up one of the largest and freest 
 movements of speculative and moral progress in all his- 
 tory. Yet in the very moment of its culmination there 
 
 ^ See citations in Kenan's Averroes, pp. 161, 162. 
 
MAHOMET. 651 
 
 set in the reaction which indicated that Mussulman the- 
 ology could not contain, or tolerate it, and live. And the 
 war upon pure rationalism fully organized against it in 
 the twelfth century, no revival has followed. Everywhere 
 the Asharite and Ghazzalite reaction took possession of 
 the powers of Islam, and their watchword was the name of 
 Ghazzah's great work, " Destruction to the Philosophers." 
 From Bagdad to Spain raged the fires of Mussulman in- 
 quisition. The great physicians, scientists, and metaphy- 
 sicians, to whom the world owes a debt that can never be 
 cancelled, were exiled, imprisoned, silenced, executed, and 
 their writings destroyed, by barbarians like the Almohades 
 in Spain and the later Abbasides in Iran. They deserve 
 a closer recognition on our part, especially as the most 
 of them were Persians, born and taught in the various 
 provinces of Iran. 
 
 Averroes was but the last in that line of Mussulman 
 philosophers whose writings, inspired and directed by the 
 genius of Aristotle and Plato, exerted a profound influ- 
 ence on Persian, and afterwards on Jewish and Christian, 
 thought.! We do not speak of such influence on the 
 Arab mind, because such speculations were never suited 
 to Its Semitic nature; what the Arabs supplied was the 
 language, which, as the result of the Mussulman conquests, 
 became the current medium of thought in that age. The 
 Aristotelians contributed very largely to this extension of 
 Arabic to the higher uses of language, if they may not 
 even be said to have produced it.^ They were earnest 
 ethical preachers, men of encyclopedic science, inspired by 
 the intense emphasis laid by Mahometan tradition on the 
 Will, either as God or man, to a profound study of its con- 
 ditions, and upon the basis of human freedom. It is won- 
 derful to note the scope of their inquiries, their aspirations 
 to the highest subjects of speculation and the broadest 
 
 1 Ueberweg: Hist, of Phil, i. 402, 403. Renan : Averroes, p. 184. * Ibid., p. 174. 
 
652 ISLAM. 
 
 fields of application, their conscientious exploration of the 
 wisdom of the past, and transmission of its best fruits to 
 future study, and their laborious lives, distributing original 
 and free methods of thought over the whole East. They 
 were not Greek scholars ; they used translations made by 
 Syro-Christians of the Nestorian and Monophysite sects, 
 who contributed the raw materials of Aristotle and Plato, 
 but wholly failed to add any original use of them. For 
 the most part, these Nestorian-Christian translators were 
 in small sympathy with Greek thought, being driven to it 
 as a refuge when their sect was expelled from the Christian 
 Church for heresy as to the Trinity, — seeking in Pagan 
 wisdom the light refused them by the Church of Christ. 
 They had found employment at the courts of the Abbaside 
 caliphs as physicians or literary scribes, fitted to gratify 
 the taste and pride of the Mussulman renaissance. The 
 beginning of translations from Greek into Oriental tongues, 
 however, began far back in the Sassanian times, in earlier 
 outbreaks of Christian intolerance, when Justinian expelled 
 the Greek philosophers of Athens to find hospitality at the 
 Persian court. ^ The schools of Nisibis, Chalcis, and Re- 
 saina, and the Monophysite studies, prepared the way for 
 the Greek renaissance. 
 
 The accumulation of materials had therefore gone on 
 for several centuries, and had become adequate for the 
 inspiration of scholars like Alfarabi, Alkindi, Avicenna 
 (Ibn Sina), and Averroes (Ibn Roshd) ; while every suc- 
 cessive generation revised and multiplied the versions.^ 
 These men were not blind worshippers of Aristotle, how- 
 ever profound their admiration for the great master.^ 
 They analyzed for themselves the ideas of Revelation 
 and Philosophy in the peculiar forms in which Islam pre- 
 
 ^ Uebenveg, i. 403. 
 
 2 For these Arabic philosophers, consult their lives in Franck's Dktionnaire des Sciences 
 Philosofihigiies, — " Arabes," p. 83. 
 
 2 See, especially, in Franck, passages from Averroes in praise of him. 
 
MAHOMET. 653 
 
 sented them.^ They sought to fill the void in Aristotle's 
 fragmentary psychology between man and God by Platonic 
 emanations, conceived after a scientific method, and by the 
 doctrine of the intelligence of the spheres ; and so to com- 
 plete the unity of the cosmos, not for the mind only, but for 
 the religious sense, — showing in this the natural instinct 
 of the Mussulman for simplicity and unity .^ They endeav- 
 ored to explain what he had left vague, and to reconcile 
 the ethical and spiritual with the philosophical side of sci- 
 ence. This was especially manifest in their development of 
 the Aristotelian theory of the two intellects, — the passive 
 Reason, conversant with material forms and subject to 
 change and death through them ; and the active Reason, 
 superior to the individual and conversant with the Immu- 
 table, and so remaining unchanged in itself. This higher 
 Reason man can appropriate and come into conjunction 
 with by patient disciplines, — moral, spiritual, and intel- 
 lectual.^ Thus they resisted the Islamic separation of God 
 and the soul, and counteracted Aristotle's notion of a sep- 
 arate prime Mover, the inconsistent point in his principles 
 of evolution. We shall see how naturally this passed over 
 into the pantheism of the Sufis. 
 
 Moreover, they refused to accept immortality as a pos- 
 tulate ; some of them denied its reality, preferring, as more 
 consistent with their psychological data, the absorption of 
 individual mind into the active Reason, which represented 
 the connecting bond between God and man, and which was 
 likened to the light, without which seeing — the passive 
 reason — was impossible. Alfarabi, who died A. D, 950, 
 denied this as an old wives' tale, and asserted annihila- 
 tion.* Averroes accepted it, as did also Avicenna.^ For 
 ethical earnestness, it would be hard to find anything more 
 
 1 Alfarabi. ^ Espe'cially Averroes (Franck, p. 749), Avicenna (Franck, p. 734). 
 
 ■" Especially Ibn-Badja (Franck, p. 744). 
 
 ♦ Franck, p. 522. 6 ibid., pp. 750-752. 
 
654 ISLAM. 
 
 impressive than the teaching of Avicenna.-^ For encyclo- 
 pedic scope, nothing could exceed the works of Alfarabt, 
 the Transoxanian scholar, of whom it has been said that 
 " what Faust desired to know, Alfarabi believed himself to 
 have already learned." '^ One thing is sure : the Arab phi- 
 losophers, whatever their individual views respecting im- 
 mortality, denied without exception the Christian doctrine 
 of the resurrection,^ and the curious orthodox Mahometan 
 conception of the renewed life beyond death, as a result, 
 not of actual continuance in any form, but of a new creation 
 by Divine Will, restoring to life a body already reduced to 
 dust.^ Ghazzali's chief reproach of the ethics of the phi- 
 losophers was that they looked for no reward of virtue but 
 that which comes here on earth in excellence itself^ 
 
 What made them most obnoxious to the orthodox 
 worshippers of the Kalam, or Word^ (Motekallemin, As- 
 harites, and others, scholastic philosophers of Islam), was 
 their incessant intermeddling with the prescriptive Islamic 
 dogma of the fore-ordaining will of God. " The doctrine 
 of the philosophers," says Makrizi, the historian, " has 
 caused the most fatal evils to religion that can be con- 
 ceived, not only increasing error, but adding an excessive 
 growth of impiety." '' They went very far in their criticism 
 of creation by Divine Will. They raised the subtile but 
 valid and effective objection, that creation at a definite 
 time would imply imperfect fulfilment of Divine Will pre- 
 vious to that time, while active manifestation is always 
 essential to perfect being. Maimonides, the greatest of 
 Jewish teachers, as well as of the earlier Motekallemin, fol- 
 lowed in the track of Christian theology, in an excessive 
 zeal to establish against these philosophies the fundamen- 
 tal or root doctrine of a monarchical Deity, — that of crea- 
 
 * Franck, p. 755. Dukes (Philos. d. Zehnt. jfark., p. 84) has given an account of his 
 famous treatise on the " origin of things." - Dukes, p. 83. 
 
 3 Renan : AverroeSyXi- 157. * Ibid., p. 158. ^ Ibid., p. 159. 
 
 6 Ibid., pp. 104, 105 ; Franck : Arabes. ' De Sacy, quoted by Franck, p. 84. 
 
MAHOMET. 655 
 
 tion out of nothing; and to make this easier, this school 
 adopted the expedient of atoms, as substances susceptible 
 of being increased by a direct Divine act, at need, and as 
 convenient units for measuring the quality of all objects. 
 Not only did the Aristotelian ferment in Islam bring out 
 in this way philosophical devices and theological refuges 
 in immense variety, but it is hardly possible to find a phase 
 of philosophical opinion which did not come up in some 
 one of those peripatetic schools of the East in the course 
 of their development. 
 
 When the orthodoxy of Ashari and Ghazzali triumphed, 
 the freer philosophical writings passed over to the Jewish 
 schools, where their thought was preserved,^ and formed 
 the basis of scholastic philosophy in mediaeval Europe, the 
 formative force of Christian dialectics, and the initiation of 
 the great struggle of reason with blind belief. The Jews 
 were the rationalists of the Middle Ages,^ especially of the 
 latter half of them. Bearers-on of the torch kindled by 
 Arabic and Persian Aristotelians, they bore the brunt of a 
 very natural Christian hostility to the anti-supernatural 
 tendencies of that scientific school. Averroes, their chief 
 philosophical master, was the chief of infidels, and so his 
 name was especially connected with the imaginary book of 
 the " Three Impostors," the bugbear of Christian ortho- 
 doxy, held infamous as assaulting the three great positive 
 religions, but which really represented the opening move- 
 ment of free thought in the thirteenth century in Germany, 
 in which the modern idea of comparative religious science 
 took its origin.^ It is not, however, our purpose to trace their 
 influence on modern freedom, and, through them, of the 
 Mussulman schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, 
 
 ^ See their influence on Saadja, and Isak al Israeli, earliest Jewish scientists (Dukes, p. 84). 
 See, for Jewish translation from the Arabic writers, Jost, Gesch. d. Jtid. 26 ; also for the in- 
 fluence of the Arab language as the medium of trade on the Jews who visited Bagdad, Jost, ii. 
 273, and for the stimulus imported by the Arabs, p. 273. 
 
 2 Renan : Averroes, p. 183. s Ibid., pp. 280, 292, and pt. ii. chap, i., xiii.-xv. 
 
656 ISLAM. 
 
 which were in fact the representatives of the boldest ration- 
 alism down to the seventeenth.^ It is enough to say, that 
 from the thirteenth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
 their impulse within the life of Judaism alone was pro- 
 foundly felt, and sufficiently to transmit the scientific spirit 
 into the very core and fibre of civilization. But in the 
 fifteenth century set in the natural reaction inevitable for 
 Hebrew monotheism ; and the war of rabbinical orthodoxy 
 upon natural law and rationalistic science merely repeated 
 that of the Motekallemin of Islam on scientific thought. 
 This result, however, was foreshadowed even in the best 
 periods and freest persons of Jewish speculative history. 
 
 The first effect of the Arabic revival on Jewish thought 
 was simply stimulative ; the Motazelites of Bagdad in the 
 eighth century awakened the Karaite sect to split away 
 from the Talmudic Rabbins; but it was mainly on the 
 question of the supposed necessity of tradition to supple- 
 ment the written law.^ In the tenth century we find 
 Saadja busy in reconciling human freedom with Divine 
 predestination, against Karaites and Aristotelians.^ And 
 even in the persons of its greatest Aristotelian representa- 
 tives, Judaism did not and could not break from its start- 
 ing-point in Divine Will, and so not, in the main, from the 
 expression of that Will in a complete and written law. 
 Their conclusions were always in the interest of Scripture 
 and Jahveh. They endeavored to resume the whole past 
 of human thought, and bring its scientific results to illus- 
 trate, explain, and justify the doctrines of Creation, Provi- 
 dence, Revelation. Their offence to orthodoxy was that 
 they made Nature and science the ground of these doc- 
 trines, instead of a direct and arbitrary supernatural Power. 
 Thus the constructive philosophy of Avicebron* sought 
 
 * See Renan's thorough account of this {Aver roes). 
 
 * Jost, ii. 294-301. 3 Ibid. 
 
 * A Spanish Jew of the eleventh century ; author of the Fans Vttce, a most influential 
 work in forming the minds of the great Christian scholastics. Uotil the recent researches of 
 
MAHOMET. 657 
 
 to combine Aristotelian psychology with the doctrines of 
 Platonic emanation and Alexandrian mysticism into one 
 conception of the universe as the unity of a supreme Sub- 
 stance and a supreme Form, of which all special substances 
 and forms were but transient expressions. But even he 
 saved himself from pantheism by introducing, somewhat 
 mechanically, into his system the Jewish conception of a 
 supreme Will, who, as Creator and Mover, mediates be- 
 tween the unity and the diversity, God and the world ; ^ 
 a conception which cannot be reconciled with emanation, 
 yet was indispensable to his Jahvistic instinct. Yet with 
 all his endeavors to reconcile the necessary movement of 
 universal laws with a personal Will, this pupil of the Ara- 
 bic and Greek schools was recognized under every disguise 
 as an enemy of the Bible and its revealed God.'-^ 
 
 Another great disciple of Averroes, Maimonides,^ — the 
 encyclopedic master of Jewish learning and thought, and 
 to the present day its most honored secular head, — repre- 
 sented the like conciliatory tendencies, and his freedom 
 received similar treatment, if not in his day, yet as soon 
 as it was understood. In his immortal work, the " Guide 
 of the Lost," it was his purpose to save those whom 
 rationalistic negations and mystic abstractions had left 
 floating without anchorage, by reconciling apparent con- 
 tradictions in a higher synthesis, — reason with faith, sci- 
 ence with religion, the God of the philosopher with the 
 God of the Hebrew believer. This he attempted to do by 
 allegorical and ideal interpretations of the Bible ; by natu- 
 ralistic views of its miracles, and spiritualization of its Jah- 
 vistic Will ; ^ by combining an Alexandrian dialectic of 
 the Infinite, reaching up into pure impersonality, with full 
 
 Munk, identifying him wth Ibn Gebirol, a well-knovvn writer of that time in various depart- 
 ments, nothing was known of him, save his great authority and his reputation as a pagan 
 rationalist. Franck : Dictionary, ■p'f. 127-131. 
 
 ' Franck: Etudes Orient., pp. 375; 376. 2 ibid., p. 380. 
 
 ' Cordova, twelfth centurj'. * Franck : Etudes Orientales, p. 329. 
 
 42 
 
658 ISLAM. 
 
 acceptance of a personal Prov^idence and a self-conscious 
 creative God.^ He takes up into his broad current the 
 manifold streams that descended through his Arabian and 
 Persian masters ; and all the wealth of learning and prac- 
 tical wisdom inherited by his century is laid by him at the 
 feet of Jewish monotheism. Of course the prodigious 
 task was in many respects a failure ; in others, it asserted 
 a philosophical science far beyond anything of which 
 Jewish monarchism was capable. But there is something 
 sublime in the loyalty of the ill-sustained scholar to his 
 idea, through every discouragement and distraction, 
 through exile and disappointment and the wild caprices 
 of despotic power, which makes him a noble type of the 
 heroic endurance and faith of his race. The freedom and 
 sense with which he develops the elements of Aristotelian 
 and Hebrew ethics into far clearer and more humane 
 principles of practical conduct than either of his earlier 
 masters,^ is equally remarkable. He teaches that sacri- 
 fices, especially of animals, are idolatry, and only permitted 
 as a transition to higher methods of worship. He defines 
 prophecy itself by natural laws, and as a genius for self- 
 sacrifice and truth.^ He dissipates the theological super- 
 stitions that grew from a physical theory of the future life, 
 and does not dogmatize upon the resurrection of the body, 
 or those details that made the immortality of the soul a 
 reality to his people. * 
 
 Maimonides is, in fact, the extreme point in pure science 
 to which the purely Hebrew conception of Jahveh and his 
 revealed Will has ever been stretched. He turns the 
 searching probe of natural light upon the literature and 
 faith of his people, to bring order and form and recon- 
 ciliation into its vast and formless mass of mingled wisdom 
 
 * Franck : Etudes Orientales. p. 349. Renan : Averroes, p. 179. 
 
 * Franck : Etudes Orientales, pp. 335-337. ^ Ibid., p. 356. 
 
 * See Geiger: Gesch. d. Jud,, iii. 3. 
 
MAHOMET. 659 
 
 and superstition, of Scripture tradition and reason. In 
 many respects, though not in consistency or in pure con- 
 centration upon ideas, he is a true predecessor of Spinoza, 
 following in large degree the same ideal guidance of unity 
 and deity which personal monotheism alone, as a crude 
 preliminary, rendered possible, but to which it also sought 
 in both cases to set limits, thus revealing its own logical 
 imperfections. Monotheism was more or less successful 
 in imposing upon Maimonides these bounds ; and its auto- 
 cratic element waged as bitter a war upon the naturalism 
 which it detected as penetrating his whole system, as was 
 that which afterwards drove Spinoza from the synagogue 
 with the ravings of barbarian hate. His authority, at first 
 carrying all before it,^ by reason of his conciliatory attitude 
 towards the Jewish scriptures and the substance of their 
 theology, soon struck against their supernaturalism and 
 the pride of Hebrew religious monopoly;^ and the strife 
 divided the Jewish world. The works of the great free- 
 thinker were burned by the joint intolerance of Christian 
 monks and Jewish rabbins in France, though with the 
 effect of rousing a reaction by the more liberal schools, 
 which went nearly to similar excesses ; and when the 
 combatants rested, though Maimonides had not been sup- 
 pressed, the great dogmas of Creation, Bible revelation, and 
 miracle, — all that was logically deducible from the rights 
 of Jahvistic Will, that indispensable centre of Judaism, — 
 remained in substantial possession of the field. Only by 
 the progress of secular thought has the greatness of 
 Maimonides been fully recognized ; and Judaism has found 
 its chief glory in this its noblest mediator with scientific 
 freedom and natural religion.^ 
 
 Even the mystical Cabala, originating in the twelfth 
 century in the longing of the more emotional class of 
 
 * Jost, iii. 23-25. 
 
 * See, especially, the language of Juda Alfachar, Geiger, iii. 47. ^ Geiger, iii. 48. 
 
66o ISLAM. 
 
 minds to escape the cold processes of the philosophers, 
 and to follow the imagination through ascending spheres 
 into the vast abyss of pure impersonal being, without will, 
 desire, or action, — using for that purpose all Biblical, 
 Talmudic, and rationalistic writings, — never threw off the 
 main doctrines that flow from the personality of the He- 
 brew God, but invested it with the mystery of numbers 
 and names, permutations of letters, and divisions of being ; 
 so that indirectly and in successive impulses it produces 
 every effect possibly falling within the sphere of perfect 
 Will, through not one intelligence, but ten ScpJitroth, un- 
 til in its later form we find it in the hands of Pico della 
 Mirandola in the sixteenth century, claimed as a great 
 organon of Christian faith, and proving the Trinity, the 
 Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the Atonement, and the 
 whole creed of the orthodox fathers.-^ 
 
 From the later forms of Graeco-Semitic philosophy, we 
 turn back to an earlier phenomenon of equal interest in 
 illustrating the warfare of theological monarchism against 
 scientific freedom. After the sharp Motazelite controver- 
 sies on predestination, the eternity of the Koran, and the 
 Divine attributes, came a more constructive protest, eclec- 
 tic, interpretative, devotional, humane. In the tenth cen- 
 tury the " Brothers of Purity," a mystico-scientific and 
 eclectic school, arose at that old intellectual centre, Basra 
 on the Euphrates, the gymnasium of Greek and Buddhist 
 and Hindu, where the Motazelites had originated, in the 
 school of Hasan, at the close of the first century of the 
 Hegira, two hundred years before. It was the fruit of an 
 intermixture of Aristotelian with free Mussulman and per- 
 haps Christian speculation, on the Perso-Aryan basis of 
 independent science. It was two centuries earlier than 
 Averroes, and probably owed less to the disciples of Aris- 
 totle than it lent them. The Moslem regards it as wholly 
 
 1 See Ginsburg : Tlie Kabbalah, p. 124.] 
 
MAHOMET. 66 1 
 
 extra-Islam. As Sprenger well suggests, it is hardly proper 
 to call it Arabian,^ — the leading writers to whom it appeals 
 being almost all of them of Persian extraction, though of 
 Mussulman training; and its nature being so purely scien- 
 tific as to lift it out of the sphere of the Arabian mind. 
 The names of its members, with very few exceptions, have 
 perished ; as if history was in sympathy with their abso- 
 lutely disinterested spirit, the true spirit of science. It was 
 one of the noblest efforts in Universal Religion or Free 
 Science ever made in human history. Its practical ear- 
 nestness and devotion issued in the production of an 
 encyclopjedia in fifty-one chapters, " Ikhwan al-Cafa," an 
 earlier Baconian " De Augmentis Scientiarum," covering 
 all the science known to the time and indicating its needs, 
 under direction of Neoplatonic theology and Aristotelian 
 cosmology. The whole past struggle of orthodoxy with 
 free inquiry was its preparatory school. Its method is the 
 most thoroughly scientific known to the time, wholly in- 
 dependent of the Koran, and often contradictory of it; 
 reaching indeed into regions where only mystical abstrac- 
 tions and theosophic subtleties were attainable. Concilia- 
 tory and catholic to the last degree, these writers never 
 shrank from maintaining the rights of reason in every pos- 
 sible branch of human inquiry. In none did they fall back 
 upon a point of departure in the dogmas of Islam. In 
 their own language they were " opposed to no form of 
 science, avoided no book, cherished no partisan prejudice 
 towards any doctrinal system ; but embraced in one 
 scheme all without exception, visible and invisible, unit- 
 ing the whole body of sciences." ^ There is preserved, 
 in the Talmud, one of their sentences : " Whoever with- 
 
 1 Zeitsckr. d. Deutsck. Morgenl. Geselisck., xxx. 333, 334. 
 
 ^ See Flugel (Zeitsc/ir. d. Deutsch. Morgeiil. GeseUsch., xiii. 29), who has fully ana- 
 lyzed this little known but most significant encyclopedia ; while a full exposition of its 
 philosophy has been given by Dieterici {Zeiischr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. GeseUsch., 
 XV. 577). 
 
662 ISLAM. 
 
 holds science from those who are worthy of it, robs 
 them." 1 
 
 They combined the Platonic and Aristotelian methods 
 of tracing all things up to Deity, and evolving all things 
 from Deity, — the deductive and inductive, mystical and 
 scientific.^ Minutely analyzing every law, process, and 
 form, under four main divisions, — mathematico-philo- 
 sophical, physical, spiritual, divine, — they led back the 
 cosmos to primal unity (to eV), whence emanations de- 
 scend, according to curious numerical laws, in graded 
 harmony, after the Pythagorean example, but on an origi- 
 nal plan. In this evolution the classes of substances in- 
 crease in numerical complexity of elements up to the 
 number nine. In a psychological point of view, from the 
 absolute Being, the primal ground of things, flows Reason ; 
 from Reason, the all-penetrating and all-moving Soul of 
 things ; from this, the abstract material of forms, not, as 
 with the Gnostics or Platonists, matter as negation and evil, 
 but as the lowest emanation, — so far a pretty consistent 
 Pantheism, fertile in subsequent special schools of this 
 nature. Their ingenious and fantastic system of cosmol- 
 ogy was at least so far reasonable as to rest on the perfec- 
 tion of the orbed or rounded form. Their idea of an inner 
 substance for mind and matter saved their science from 
 becoming, as modern science is becoming, a mere watch- 
 ing and scoring of flowing phenomenal details.^ The 
 emotional Arab found this speculative penetration and ex- 
 altation apart from the purpose of life, and, however stim- 
 ulating, thoroughly tiresome and unproductive. " They 
 weave a thin robe," he said ; " hover over but do not 
 grasp things, reach out after the impossible." * Such were 
 
 1 Dukes : Philos. d. Zehni. Jahrh., p. 12. 
 
 2 Ueberweg, i. 412. Dieterici (Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xxxi. 120). 
 
 * Dieterici gives a passage from The Theology 0/ Aristotle to the same effect (Zeitschr. 
 d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xxxi. 12). 
 
 * Flugel {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xiii. 26). 
 
 i 
 
MAHOMET. 663 
 
 the conceptions of that desert people who, in spite of 
 themselves, were made to prepare the highways of science, 
 and to impart to spheres of thought which they could not 
 understand that ardor and courage which they had brought 
 to bear on conquest and on faith. They did here great in- 
 justice to the Brothers, who differed from the other syste- 
 matizers of their time in making scientific knowledge, with 
 a view to practical helpfulness, the foundation of their work, 
 not mere theosophy or contemplation ; and they began with 
 what is nearest, not with the remote and unknown. 
 
 The anthropology of the Brothers was based on the 
 Socratic principle of self-study ; ^ and then the human 
 world was seen as an inseparable part of the infinite sys- 
 tem of Nature. " It would be a shame to pretend knowl- 
 edge of the true being of things, but to know nothing of 
 our own." .Man was a microcosm ; a fact which they sym- 
 bolized by a tree, with its boughs, trunk, and roots ; by a 
 race, with its tribes, families, and houses; by a law, with 
 its articles, clauses, forms of obedience and faith ; by the 
 workshop, with its tools and processes ; by a castle, with 
 its chambers, halls, and furniture ; by a city, with its mani- 
 fold life ; by a king, with his complicated state.^ Of evil 
 they perhaps wisely forbore to attempt a philosophic so- 
 lution ; deriving it neither from matter nor from mind, 
 but recognizing its actual partition of animals, souls, and 
 spirits with good ; while the body is discerned to be for 
 some a prison, for others a pathway of light. Yet in this 
 world of finiteness, of birth and death, every soul is under 
 severe limits ; which, however, do not forbid it to find its 
 way to bliss, especially as aided by prophetic men and by 
 messages from higher spheres. The future has its heaven 
 and hell, and its judgment-day, after seven millennial 
 periods, when the All-Soul shall weigh all conduct in real 
 
 1 Thirty-second Treatise. 
 
 2 Dieterici {Zeitschr. d. Deuisck. Morsenl. Gesellsch-, xv. 607). 
 
664 ISLAM. 
 
 and impartial scales.^ In all this partially traditional be- 
 lief the main and distinctive point is, that it is conceived 
 as under strict laws of order and development, the theory 
 of which is of the most inclusive character. In their 
 personal and literary sources of knowledge they include 
 philosophers, — especially Greek, — prophets, and religious 
 teachers,'^ writers on natural science, and sacred books. 
 Ibn Rafia, their chief writer, when asked to what school he 
 belonged, replied, " To none." ^ The breadth and geniality 
 of their interest in the relation of the brute to the human 
 world is shown in the beautiful romance of " The Strife 
 of Men and Beasts" as to superior uses, before a judge. 
 This constituted the fifty-first treatise. 
 
 But no source is equal to that of the soul itself, when in 
 harmony with that which it seeks, " If one knows not 
 what is godlike, he cannot know God." ^ " The soul with- 
 drawn from sense, and calm, rises into the highest sphere 
 and finds its rich reward."^ Sentences like these show 
 mystic, perhaps Buddhistic, relations. Others seem taken 
 from the golden verses of Pythagoras. Some of a mystic 
 tendency are ascribed to Aristotle and quoted as his '"'The- 
 ology," — probably a spurious work, yet familiar to Jewish 
 and Persian students ; *" said to have been translated for Al- 
 kindi out of Greek by a Christian, one hundred years be- 
 fore the "Brothers of Purity;" the Brothers themselves 
 cherished a profound veneration for Aristotle as penetfat- 
 ing in bodiless form the whole invisible world. In Mai- 
 monides in the twelfth century we find the same principles; 
 so that, as Dieterici says, we stand, as it were, at the first 
 morning glow on a great comb of oceanic waves. '^ A pro- 
 
 * Dieterici {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch Morgenl. Gesellsch., xv. 614.) 
 
 * According to Sprenger, with especial cordiality towards Jesus. Zeitschr. d. DeutscJt 
 Morgenl. Gesellsch.. xxx. 332. 
 
 3 Flugel {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xiii. 26). 
 
 * Dukes, p. 14. This is taken from Aristotle. 6 Ibid., p. 15. ^ Ibid., p. 17. 
 ' Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xxxi, 122. 
 
MAHOMET. 665 
 
 found conception of the unity and harmony of the universe 
 thus runs through the thought of the ages in a definite 
 series. Out of this came the impulse to Scholasticism ; in 
 it is the battle of Nominalism and Realism fought out 
 before it came up in the Christian world ;^ in it is the 
 opening of modern science, — all mediated by the Ara- 
 bian schools. 
 
 That which gives the Brothers the most interest for us, 
 however, is the supreme place which they accorded to 
 the ethical element. Men have diverse powers and limita- 
 tions, both in their faculties for reaching truth and in their 
 outward means of cultivating what they have ; but there 
 was no difference as to the claim of brotherhood among 
 them : one heart and one aim was the motto of the whole 
 movement, while envy and ill-will were absolutely re- 
 nounced. Moral gifts were esteemed higher than intel- 
 lectual ; and religious insight and trust, strength of soul 
 through the disciplines of sacrifice and mastery of the 
 senses, were highest of all. Faith without works, knowing 
 without doing, were vain. In short, their earnest recog- 
 nition, amidst the war of sects and creeds, of the demands 
 of thoughtful, intelligent, and right-minded persons for 
 personal sympathy, and their desire to put foundations 
 for clear, free thinking, for trustful, helpful living, under 
 the feet of mankind, is a crown of universal religion, 
 which only waits to be seen by our age, to receive its 
 highest homage. 
 
 Of course in such a semi-barbarous epoch, political and 
 social, and in an Oriental monarchy, their movement was 
 more or less esoteric and secret, though by no means 
 wholly so. Probably more for the purpose of strengthen- 
 ing the bonds of friendship and securing practical fur- 
 therance than from anything exclusive in their spirit, they 
 pursued the method of propagating the society by branches 
 
 1 Dieterici {Zeitschr. d. Detetsck. Morgenl. Gesellsch-, xxxi. p. 126). 
 
666 ISLAM. 
 
 in every city of the empire which could supply a nucleus 
 of thoughtful persons, wherein scientific and social prob- 
 lems were discussed, and literary work done.^ At Bagdad 
 especially they were much talked of. Their pledge, as 
 given by Al Mukadassi,was to complete and perfect friend- 
 ship in the cause of truth ; to make the end of their in- 
 quiries consist in the purification of their thoughts and 
 lives through philosophy and mutual help. 
 
 But with all its tendencies to mystical and even panthe- 
 istic science, this great school of Grseco-Aryan philosophy 
 remains within the charmed circle of Semitic monotheistic 
 Will. At the root of all the emanations is a personal 
 Creator, whose volition is the ground of the mystic num- 
 bers and of the immanent soul.^ In this they are distin- 
 guished from the later Sufis. The all-conscious Will creates 
 all, though unlike all,^ out of his positive purpose. To 
 meet this demand of absolutist Will, they modified the 
 pantheistic tendencies which we have described. But 
 their pursuit of pure science, with ardent faith in univer- 
 sal law in place of arbitrary will, was sufficient. Their 
 encyclopaedia was burned at Bagdad in the twelfth century 
 by order of the caliph Mostanjid.^ The reaction prepared 
 by Ghazzali and Ashari led to the persecution of philos- 
 ophy in all parts of Islam. 
 
 Yet this orthodox revival itself could not escape the 
 pov/erful influence of the Aryan science, whose full light 
 it could not bear. It shows a stamp of mystical and even 
 pantheistic freedom, which does not belong to Koranic 
 theism, and was necessitated by the goads of science. 
 The " Akhlak-i-Jalaly," a " compend of the practical phi- 
 losophy of the Mahometan people," ^ representing the tra- 
 
 1 Flugel, p. 28. 
 
 * Dieterici {Zeitschr. d- Detitsch. Morgenl. Geselhck., xv. 585, 597). 
 ' Ibid., XV. 603. 
 
 * See Mohl : Vingt-sept Ans d'' Etudes Orient., ii. 338. 
 
 " Published originally at time of taking Constantinople. Translated by W. F. Thompson, 
 Esq., Oriental Fund Series. 
 
MAHOMET. ^'j 
 
 ditional opinions of the orthodox schools of Islam, shows 
 everywhere the deepest traces of the influence in question ; 
 and not the least by claiming that the very philosophy 
 which had caused the free-thinking Graeco-Persian schools 
 to be cast out as heretics was derived from Semitic 
 sources. 
 
 " The gard'ner's beauty is not of himself; 
 His hue the rose's, and his form the palm's." 
 
 On this account, it pretends that the later Moslem philo- 
 sophers had withdrawn all respect from the dogmas and 
 books of the pagans.^ It rises to an exalted praise of con- 
 templation in a truly Platonic spirit, — the worship of per- 
 fect truth, beauty, and eternal mystery.^ This spirit is not 
 only put into the mouth of Aristotle himself, without the 
 slightest reason, but made the ground of a parallel between 
 the Greek free-thinkers and the teachings of the Koran, 
 and even the Sunna.^ " The greatest fathers of mysticism 
 and investigation " are alike adduced to prove that the 
 supreme intelligence, " called the Mahometan spirit," com- 
 prehends in itself all that is, " as the seed contains the 
 branches, leaves, and fruit."* Even Ghazzali's stringent 
 orthodoxy was far from the bald will-worship of the Koran, 
 and, bitter as he was towards the free-thinkers, was itself so 
 heretical to the Spanish schools that his great work against 
 philosophy was burned with those of his opponents. Both 
 of the great representatives of triumphant orthodoxy are 
 found to have given up the old idea of the eternity of the 
 letters and sounds of Scripture, replacing that idea by a 
 symbolizing and idealizing process, in order to reach the 
 inmost idea of the Koran, as its eternal part, thus practi- 
 cally giving up the historical field.^ By means of such 
 partial accommodations to the free thought of the Per- 
 
 1 Akklak-i-Jcdaly, p. 139. 2 ibid. p. 355. 3 Ibid., p. 357. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 359. 6 See Kremer : Herrsch. Ideen, p. 249. 
 
668 ISLAM. 
 
 sian mind, the orthodox schools won sufficient hold on 
 the popular instincts of Islam to second the acquisition 
 of political and military force in support of their war on 
 free scientific thought. Their theology was the precise 
 spiritual analogue of the political absolutism of the Abba- 
 side caliphate, from which it proved at last inseparable. 
 It is true that for the most part the earlier Abbasides were 
 indifferent in religion, and, being the product of the Per- 
 sian Shiite against the old Arab party, disposed to favor 
 the philosophic schools. Al Mamun (a.d. 813 to 833) was 
 a decided free-thinker, most friendly to Greek philosophy, 
 and opposed to orthodox views of the Koran. Under the 
 eye of Al Rashid, sects of free-thinkers spread through 
 Islam. Nevertheless, none of these princes was an intel- 
 ligent promoter of broad and scientific thought. They 
 were without exception prone to persecution in some 
 form; yet Al Mamun said, "If it were known how I 
 delight in pardoning, all who have offended me would 
 come and confess their crimes." ^ The glory that shone 
 around the brows of the legendary caliph, Hariin Al Ra- 
 shid, has sadly faded ; and he stands the convicted type of 
 a cruel, unprincipled tyrant. History has nothing to show 
 more atrocious than his massacre of the great official fam- 
 ily of the Barmecides, to whose virtues his reign is really 
 indebted for all that has made it immortal.^ Ibn Khaldun, 
 in his "Prolegomena," defended Al Rashid, saying that the 
 Barmecides were taking all his power from him. During 
 the reigns of these monarchs the four great orthodox sects 
 were founded and flourishing. Patronage of free thought 
 was really due to their viziers, men for the most part of 
 Persian birth and of remarkable ability.^ In truth, so 
 
 1 Dozy : VHistoire de VIslamtsme, chap. viii. See also Al Monsater's plea for mercy 
 to the fallen. 
 
 - See Palmer's Z.^/!' of Haroun Al Raschid {iZio); and Wiel : Gesch. d. Chalifen,\\. 139; 
 Braun, p. 218. 
 
 3 Dozy: VHUtoire, etc 
 
MAHOMET. 669 
 
 prodigious was the impulse given to intellectual activity 
 by the commingling of Persian freedom with Islamic zeal 
 and passion, that from the eighth to the tenth century 
 the spectacle it presented in the East was perhaps un- 
 exampled in history. Orthodoxy was §tung into prodi- 
 gious efforts for collecting the Mussulman traditions and 
 disseminating the true faith among the multitudes, with 
 the aid of colleges, Ulemas, and public sessions. Ibn 
 Abdallah Mohammed, surnamed from his birthplace Bok- 
 hari, — who spent as much labor in collecting the tra- 
 ditions of the Mahometan faith as Firdusi spent in gath- 
 ering the legends of the old Iranian, till they amounted 
 to 600,000, restoring from his memory the text of all 
 compilers, and carefully separating the chaff from the 
 wheat till he had reduced them to 7,275, which he set 
 forth as the genuine body of the oldest truth, the fruit of 
 thirty-two years of toil and of travel over the whole domain 
 of Islam, — found a host of eager hearers wherever he ap- 
 peared. He had lectured at Bagdad and Basra when a 
 beardless youth to 20,000 scholars, and at a period " when 
 in Christian Europe most people could not write their own 
 names." ^ Everywhere schools and colleges for instruction 
 in the faith were established ; poor students were sup- 
 ported, libraries endowed and filled with books. His work 
 on Mahometanism was encyclopedic ; covered every pos- 
 sible division of faith, conduct, civil and ecclesiastical law, 
 religious rites, and secular occupations, — the origins, the 
 exegetics, the dogmatics of Islam. Devoutly orthodox as 
 he was, in that age of polemics he did not escape the 
 charge of heresy, and was driven at last out of Bokhara, 
 his native city, to die at Samarkand in the year 256 of 
 the Hegira.2 It must have been fearfully fascinating for 
 the people to hear from his stores of tradition how the 
 
 1 Kremer: Herrsch. Ideen, p. 433. 
 
 - Hammer-Purgstall has an abstract of his works. 
 
6/0 ISLAM. 
 
 believers, passing into the prison of final judgment to learn 
 their need of an intercessor, try all the prophets in vain till 
 they come to Mahomet, who alone has power with the 
 Almighty to save his elect, while the rest must burn for- 
 ever. 
 
 Again, there was comfort in being told, on the same au- 
 thority, that God would save all who had faith equal to a 
 dinar's weight, or even to a grain of dust; and of his draw- 
 ing out of hell those whose skins had been scorched, to 
 cool them in the streams of Paradise, so that they bloom 
 like sweet wild plants, and without merit of their own are 
 called the ransomed of the All-Merciful.^ So similar in 
 all ages and faiths is the capricious theology of a divine 
 monarchical Will. Bokhari was as much of an enthusi- 
 ast for orthodox culture and for a faith whose idea was 
 mighty within him from the whole impulse of his age to 
 religious study, as Firdusi's faith in himself was mighty 
 from the pure Iranian genius of a much more human and 
 heroic Will. These two contemporaries of eastern Iran 
 represent admirably the contending elements of that grand 
 ferment of the free human and the monarchic divine which 
 covered Iran with wonderful intellectual productivity in 
 all classes of the people in that age. A class of lawyers 
 and exegetists then arose whose subtile hair-splitting and 
 casuistry resemble the doings of Hebrew Talmudists and 
 Christian Scholastics, and run down into the writing of vol- 
 umes on the Prophet's slipper.^ True, too, is it that the 
 Mongol Turkish literature of Transoxania, of Samarkand, 
 Bokhara, and Merv, was almost exclusively of a theologi- 
 cal and scholastic character, while the free south-Persian 
 mind expanded in more secular and scientific fields. The 
 command of the traditional theology over the ignorant 
 multitude, and its natural affinity with the political system 
 
 1 Krehl {Zeitschr. d. Deuiscli. Morgenl. GeseUsch.., iv. 1-32). 
 * Kremer, p. 179. 
 
MAHOMET. 671 
 
 of Islam, gave immense advantage to the orthodox schol- 
 ars and their supporters, the Ulemas. The consequent 
 sway and swing of blind faith and prescriptive creed pro- 
 duced their usual effect, — a mixture of hypocrisy and 
 devotion. The writings of the best teachers abound in 
 denunciations of the Pharisaical pretences of humility, and 
 of the ostentatious patronage of religion, which corrupted 
 the church of the Prophet, — the faUing away of the rulers 
 from that democracy and that self-surrender which ren- 
 dered the earlier caliphs indistinguishable from the mean- 
 est of their subjects.^ Still, it remains true that the history 
 of the great controversies of which Iran was the theatre 
 down to the twelfth century, prove a productivity and an 
 ardor in the Mussulman mind as wonderful as those in the 
 mind of any other race which has been swayed by a posi- 
 tive religion in the history of mankind. Islam has made 
 good its faith in its own Prophet's maxim, " The ink of 
 the wise is more precious than the blood of the martyrs." 
 It has echoed through centuries his cry for the Koran, 
 " Blessed be God, who hath taught mankind the use of 
 the pen ! " It has followed his example in placing men 
 of science second only to prophets. Narrow as its reli- 
 gious creed was, especially during the Mongol period, 
 it could not shut out the Greek scientist or the Persian 
 free-thinker from southern Iran. No religion has ever 
 shown such a multitude of sects ; it even serves to make 
 up for the baldness of its own monotheism by an instinc- 
 tive yearning to include within its unity the thoughts of all 
 thinkers and the faiths of all believers. It has the same 
 drift in later times. Akbar Shah, Ismail, and Nadir Shah, 
 all sought to found a universal religion by mingling Chris- 
 tianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Driven up into the 
 speculative height of theological discussion, three quarters 
 of its immense literature of from twenty to thirty thousand 
 
 ' Kremer, p. 434-437, especially Ghazzali. 
 
6/2 ISLAM. 
 
 works ^ were of scholastic import; and its contributions 
 to natural philosophy have, in comparison with what has 
 followed since the revival of science and letters in modern 
 times, a meagre interest. Yet for the positive sciences 
 these Mussulman debaters were far more effective fore- 
 runners than their Christian contemporaries;^ far readier 
 also, and earlier to accept the stimulus of Greek studies 
 of Nature. How it happened that after the twelfth cen- 
 tury this ardor for mixed speculation ceased, and Islam's 
 intellectual work seemed to be done, is a question that is 
 not more naturally asked than it is easily answered. 
 
 1 Sprenger {Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellsch., xxxii. 2). 
 
 2 The greatest Arabian philosophers wrote encyclopedic works, — Masddi, Bokhari, 
 Ghazzali ; Masildi, a great and philosophic writer on jurisprudence in the ninth cen- 
 tury; Vicut, prince of geographers, twelfth century {Zeilschr. d. Deiitsdi. Morgenl. 
 Gesellsch., xviii. 397); Sharastani, historian of the sects, thirteenth century; Ibn Khaldan, 
 fourteenth centur>', most liberal and truly scientific of all the writers of his race, a true his- 
 torical thinker, who has been called by Mohl the Montesquieu of Islam (Mohl, ii. 629); 
 Ibn Batuta, fourteenth century, traveller, envoy in Europe, Asia, Africa, for twenty-five years; 
 Al Makkari, author of an excellent history of the Moorish dynasties of Spain, seventeenth cen- 
 tury. These are but a few of the most important names. The first academy of science in the 
 Middle Ages was that of the Saracens at Toledo, in Spain (see Hammer-Purgstall : Lileraiur- 
 geschichte, i. Ixii). The free university at Cairo, the House of Wisdom, in the eleventh cen- 
 tury, anticipated Bacon's ideal with a fact. The "Brothers of Purity" established the most 
 remarkable institution for the cultivation of science previous to modem times. See, for full 
 account of Mussulman literature and progress in outline, Hammer-Purgstall, i. Ixi. Never 
 were there more diligent collectors of books than the Mahometan scholars and sultans. (See 
 summary in Hammer-Purgstall, i, Ixxi, and Ixxii.) The library of Al WSkidi, ninth century, 
 required one hundred and twenty camels, with six hundred chests, to carry it from Bagdad to 
 beyond the Tigris (Purgstall, i. Ixvi). Purgstall's immense plan for the history of Mahometan 
 science is little known to scholars. It was to be preceded by twelve quarto volumes of the 
 literature of the Arabs, biographical and selective, with translations into German blank verse. 
 Unfortunately it was not begun till his seventy-sixth year. This great series was printed for 
 seven years at the rate of one volume a year, ending only with his death (Mohl : Vingt-sepi 
 A MS, etc.). He enumerates five thousand two hundred and eighteen writers down to the 
 eleventh century (Ibid., 139), before western Europe had accomplished anything approxi- 
 mately equivalent to their work. The Saracens taught the pendulum as a measure of time, 
 and a crude form of the telegraph also; introduced the manufacture of silk and of cotton into 
 Spain, camels and carrier-pigeons into Sicily, the art of enamelling steel, national police, tax- 
 ation and public libraries, paper and gunpowder ; and everywhere laid the foundation of 
 popular education in schools, academies, and colleges (Crichton : Arabia, xiii). They taught 
 agriculture as a Koranic duty. 
 
 Two of the marvels of literature inspired by universality of sympathy were the Ayin Akbery, 
 or Institutes of Akbar, and the Dabistan, written half a century afterwards by Mohsin-Fani 
 to follow up its noble conception, and whose wide demonstration of the religions of the world 
 stands under the immortal maxims, " The leaves of God's book are the religious persuasions," 
 and " The time of a prophet is a universal time, and hath neither before nor after, as the Lord 
 had neither mom nor eve" (chap. xii.). 
 
MAHOMET. 673 
 
 The first reason was the triumph of orthodoxy over free 
 thought, in the twelfth century, which we have already 
 seen to have been involved in the cardinal principle of 
 Mussulman theology, — the ultimate sovereignty of pure 
 Will. To that sovereignty morality, reason, law, inquiry, 
 were all subordinate; and it finally subjugated them all, 
 and there has been no revival. Islam has had no priestly 
 hierarchy to silence thought, so that there has always been 
 a comparative license in teaching, which the natural scep- 
 ticism of the Arab, the subtile intellect of the Persian, and 
 the practical secularism of the Greek have kept alive, till 
 they leavened with doubt or indifference, or stimulated to 
 incessant self-assertion, the numerous commingled races 
 of Iran. Doubtless this disintegrating work would have 
 gone on towards a successful demand for unity on the 
 large ground of positive studies, but for the constant re- 
 pressive force of a supernaturalistic theology of Will, — 
 especially with the Mongol races when they swept over 
 Iran, — which diverted the thinker into the line of dog- 
 matic subtleties, just as the same thing had been done 
 by Christianity, centuries before, from similar causes, and 
 by Judaism in Rabbinical days. 
 
 The second reason was the despotic politics of Islam, 
 which were moulded on the theology of Islam, and in- 
 sensibly became its practical servant or instrument. Kera- 
 mat Ah, in a letter to Sprenger, wrote : " The scholars of 
 Islam have followed the rod of despots, and spent all their 
 time in developing new subtleties." ^ Thinkers who must 
 exhaust themselves on abstractions, and cannot put their 
 thought into institutions on the solid earth, cannot accom- 
 plish progress. The confusion of the theological with the 
 political law was the great obstacle to reform, and continues 
 
 1 See the formularies of caliphs prescribing the absolute submission of them to their 
 officials, and giving the authority of a Christian Nestorian bishop. Kremer (_Zeitschr. d. 
 Deutsch. Morgenl Gesellsch., xxxii. i8). 
 
 43 
 
6/4 ISLAM. 
 
 to be so ; the power of the Ulemas to resist it has ahvays 
 supported itself on the authority of the State, and wrought 
 by influencing and governing it. In Iran, despotic Ma- 
 hometan opposition to this embodiment of thought in 
 action, this nerve-energy that flashes from brain to hand, 
 was so contrary to the whole stress of intellectual organiza- 
 tion, that it demoralized the whole national mind, and for 
 a time, at least, reduced its fires to smouldering ashes. 
 
 To understand the relations of Mussulman royalty to 
 religious and intellectual freedom, we must note the influ- 
 ence of the conquest of Persia on the Arab mind. When 
 the invaders took the capital city of Khosru, they did not 
 know the value of the booty. Some offered to exchange 
 gold for silver, and others mistook camphor for sulphur. 
 They came like swarms of half-starved locusts to devour 
 the land. They were banditti of the desert, with no culture 
 but the inspiration of the clan, and the thirst for individual 
 glory and reward. Their conquests were of the nature of 
 an emigration of clans. The only idea of government in 
 these tribes was the leadership of age and valor, as repre- 
 sented in the sheikh, with a natural mixture of hereditary 
 respect. On the death of Mahomet they broke into re- 
 bellion.^ Islam really came on the world like a fierce 
 descent of desert clans on their foes. Khaled was a thun- 
 derbolt of destruction upon it; yet he it was that made 
 Islam conqueror, and saved it from disintegrating. Ma- 
 homet's ideal of government was just to send his gov- 
 ernors through Arabia to establish Islam, and then to 
 collect tributes from the poor, in camels and sheep, also 
 as plunder to meet the expenses of his campaign.^ 
 Wrought to fanatical passion by the feeling that the eye 
 of Allah was on every one of his chosen warriors, and 
 that " Paradise was under the shadow of swords," they 
 were ill suited to reconstruct and administer the affairs of 
 
 ' Ockley : History of tlie Saraceits, p. 215. - Kremer, p. 313. 
 
MAHOMET. 675 
 
 a grand and ancient empire, for hundreds of years the 
 centre of Eastern religions and the field of innumerable 
 sects, where two forces were at least greater than the 
 traditional absolutism of rulers, — namely, the pride of 
 local freedom and the license of individual thought.^ 
 Neither intellectually nor politically was Islam capable of 
 gaining the respect of an empire which domestic disunity 
 alone '"^ had forced to submit to Bedouin hordes perma- 
 nently settling on lands mastered by nomadic raids. Yet 
 such was the need of unity, — so hopeless were the divisions 
 of Zendik free-thinkers and Avestan scripturalists, of Mani- 
 chseans and Mazdakites, of Christians, Magi, and Jews ; so 
 bottomless the gulf of sceptical, abstract, and unchartered 
 speculations which had opened under the feet of thinkers; 
 so balked had been the longings of really free spirits to 
 found schools of universal religion on an ethical and spirit- 
 ual basis, — that all Iran was disposed to welcome the new 
 dispensation, whose first decrees invited free thought and 
 promised a form of impartial unity, in a spirit that, so far 
 at least as the believers themselves were concerned, had 
 many elements of democratic equality.^ The earliest caliphs 
 were men of great power, and on the whole of extraordi- 
 nary integrity, as well as determined will. The firm hand 
 of Ahxi Bekr repressed revolt; the supreme wisdom and 
 valor of Omar, the constructive spirit of Othman, ennobled 
 mere barbarian conquest into empire ; the terrible sword 
 of Khaled at the siege of Damascus had its antidote on the 
 spot, in the merciful heart of Abu Obeydah. Like the 
 Prophet, the first caliphs went in humblest attire like reli- 
 gious devotees, and lived like the poorest of their subjects. 
 Abu Bekr took his part of the public revenue with the 
 rest; had no civil list; had one slave; chose Omar for his 
 
 * For political influence of heretical sects, see Kremer, pp. 362-371. 
 2 It had no system of administration of its own. Kremer. 
 
 * See Dozy, pp. 191-195. 
 
6']6 ISLAM. 
 
 virtues, took pains to question the best men respecting him, 
 and then proposed him for confirmation to the people ; and 
 died praying for his subjects.^ These men were of the 
 serious, sad type of Arabic sheikh, earnest fanatics, single- 
 hearted, passionate for personal rule and religious sway. 
 Omar was, as we have said, the Paul of Islam ; but for him, 
 it would have perished. He was greater than Mahomet. 
 He founded the unity of the Moslem Church, made Ara- 
 bic the official language of the empire, while Otliman gave 
 unity to the Scriptural canon by destroying all copies of 
 the Koran but that traced to the Prophet's wife.^ Ali, 
 — who, partly from political causes, had first the good- 
 will and then the adoration of the Persians, — though 
 accused of crimes unproven, possessed many noble traits. 
 He made the caliphate itself, from which he had been 
 wrongfully excluded, an object of homage by his magna- 
 nimity, forbearance, and humanity, in the emergencies that 
 grew out of his misfortunes,^ and finally, by his martyrdom, 
 raised its despotic claims to a divine right. Even in the 
 beginning the Arab leaders were possessed with a full 
 sense of their claim to be a nation chosen to rule by right 
 of Divine appointment. While their system was almost 
 communistic, at least socialistic, dividing revenue per head 
 among the soldiers, and opening paths to position to the 
 worthiest without distinction of wealth, of course political 
 life reflected this supernatural authority that they claimed. 
 They formed military camps in Irak, lived on the con- 
 quered people, and were kept separate from the conquered 
 by Othman's prohibition of a Moslem from owning land in 
 the country which they came to rule.* The aristocratic 
 and democratic Arab was in fact transported into the con- 
 quered States as a high privileged caste, under what pur- 
 
 ^ Sprenger, i. 409-411. ^ Hammer-Purgstall ; Preface, p. xxxix. 
 
 * See Crichton, Ockley, etc. 
 
 * For Othman's regulations, see Kremer : Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam, pp. 326-333. 
 
MAHOMET. ^'J'J 
 
 ported to be a theocratic government, with a successor to 
 the Prophet as the representative of Divine Will. In such 
 a despotism the doctrine of supernatural revelation by a 
 personal Will must inevitably end. This submission, how- 
 ever thoroughly consistent with the Koran, as well as with 
 the character of these Semitic tribes, — who were as ex- 
 clusive and aristocratic as they were contemptuous towards 
 all human laws, — was nevertheless in full logical accord 
 with the worship of absolute Will and the religious ideal 
 of personal unity. These caliphs were the natural succes- 
 sors of the old Assyrian kings. Of course nothing could 
 be more obnoxious to the Persian tribes and their Turanic 
 intermixture than to be so governed in eastern Iran by 
 successive gods set over them. It was more oppressive 
 than Rome, since there was no protection against extor- 
 tion by a horde of invading fanatics. From one end of 
 Iran to the other, and especially in the eastern States, the 
 spirit of revolt was constantly alive. At no moment had 
 the caliphate a recognized sway over the whole country. 
 The opposition of Persian and Arab gives its coloring to 
 the whole history of the two great dynasties, and determines 
 their destinies. By keeping down with a strong hand the 
 numerous elements of discord in Arabia, by clearing that 
 country of all manner of unbelievers, who took refuge in 
 the larger liberty of Iran, and by the large overflow of en- 
 thusiastic soldiers from the vast depths of the original hive, 
 the earliest caliphs, especially Omar, sought, with partial 
 success, to maintain the strength and purity of the ruling 
 caste in Asia. The demoralized condition of the Sassanian 
 and Byzantine empires did much to advance this purpose. 
 But the civil wars descending from old Arabian feuds of 
 Hashemites and Omeyyads, of Moawiyah and the Aliites, 
 were irrepressible. The old rage of the desert clans lived 
 on, the old hate revived, and the wild Arab was Arab 
 still, when all Asia lay at his feet. The caliphs themselves 
 
6/8 ISLAM. 
 
 for the most part shared the passionate, unbridled frenzy 
 which belongs to irresponsible power, and were ill fitted to 
 hold the empire together. Nevertheless, the sceptre of Is- 
 lam held sway for seven centuries ; and the incessant revo- 
 lutions of sects and provinces and petty principalities, and 
 even States, in East and West, down to this present mo- 
 ment, have failed to destroy its prestige or its power. The 
 reason is that the worship of a supreme personal Will not 
 only amalgamated with the traditions of the various races 
 of Iran, but by its very simplicity and barrenness of dog- 
 matic contents gave room for such play of subordinate 
 systems and creeds as the more positive and formalized 
 theism of Christianity never allowed. It is therefore the 
 typical religion of personal Will, so far as concerns capa- 
 bilities of comprehensiveness, and inclusive power. This 
 advantage in their central principle the earlier caliphs 
 knew how to make more effective by accepting and appro- 
 priating an amount of foreign influence which alone could 
 account for the establishment of an enduring empire by a 
 horde of rude predaceous tribes. Not only were Persians 
 the creators and developers of Moslem theology, the 
 founders of its sects, the teachers of its schools, the col- 
 lectors and preservers of its traditions,^ but the whole Arab 
 race underwent a transforming education by Iranian ex- 
 perience and culture, — which is one of the most marvel- 
 lous instances in history of the continuity and persistence 
 of national forces. 
 
 It was an absolute necessity for the founders of the Mus- 
 sulman empire in the East to adopt, in the main, the finan- 
 cial and administrative experience of their more cultured 
 subjects. These native races were at first remanded to a 
 political and social condition of clientship imitated from 
 desert relations ; they became freedmen bound to their 
 patrons by certain feudal ties and very limited rights.^ 
 
 * Dozy, pp. 194, 195. 2 Kremer : Herrsch. Ideen d. Islam, p. 348. 
 
MAHOMET. 679 
 
 The conquered were called red-haired, the masters black- 
 haired. But this attempt to engraft on the splendid empire 
 of the Sassanians an institution based on the tribal laws 
 and customs of the desert was successful only so long as 
 it aided the armies of Omar in obtaining a strong foothold 
 in Iran through a systematic subordination and use of the 
 human material at hand.^ The necessities of the situation 
 overpowered all appliances of this kind. Arabic names, 
 customs, language, rites, penetrated the empire ; but under 
 their external forms appeared the native ideas and methods. 
 Omar adopted the old taxation system of Nushirvan. The 
 native Dikhans, who had always held the civil and po- 
 litical management of Iran, retained it till the Turkish 
 /vasions.^ 
 Omar's prohibition of an Arab's owning land outside 
 of Arabia disappeared very speedily, and with it the possi- 
 bility of making the Arabs a separate ruling clan, a mere 
 camp of military masters in the land. They became rich, 
 and thence came the hiring of mercenary troops and mili- 
 tary colonies, and the fall of the empire. Persians, Jews, 
 and Christians intermarried with their masters, and the 
 pure blood of the desert became a myth. A strong party, 
 which set character above descent, was formed against it, 
 and even filled the ranks of a puritan rebellion. The only 
 permanent effect of clientage was to develop a class of 
 scholars and statesmen of the various races, who by 
 sheer necessity acquired possession of the offices of State 
 and education ; and they were to a very great extent Per- 
 sians. Persians were the leaders and shapers of Islamic 
 culture. The simple Arabs learned of these larger brains 
 and more sensuous imaginations music, architecture, sculp- 
 ture, politics, philosophy, wine, and fine apparel. Persians 
 were the real founders and teachers of the great academic 
 clubs and schools. The Persians, not the Arabs, gave 
 
 * Dozy, pp 34S, 349. * Kremer: Culturgeschichte, i. 158. 
 
680 ISLAM. 
 
 firmness and force to Islam, and from them have issued 
 the most remarkable sects. They were the grand viziers 
 who gave immortality to frivolous and barbarian kings. 
 They were the great free-thinkers, the great physicians, 
 the great travellers, the great historians and jurisprudents, 
 who have given a finer immortality to the faith of the 
 Prophet. These masters in Islam, if you trace them back 
 to their cradles, are natives of Bokhara and Khorassan and 
 Bactria, and from the old native schools of Basra and 
 Nishapur, and Samarkand and Herat, — some of Turkish, 
 but mainly of Persian origin. The great impulse from the 
 Greek schools came largely through the Christian heretics 
 of Nisibis and Edessa. That these statements arc not too 
 strong, is plain from the fact that most of the great writers 
 were frcednicn, as well as from such confessions as that 
 wrung from the caliph Abd al Malik, "Alas! freedmen are 
 masters of the free Arab." 
 
 Under the force of assimilation the Arab families were 
 transformed into large land-owners, merged in the general 
 population, and ceased to be available by the caliphs for 
 purposes of government or Avar. Resort was therefore had 
 to military colonies and mercenary troops raised from the 
 numerous petty States of the empire. Endless revolutions, 
 weakness at the centre, general demoralization of the caliph- 
 ate, introduction of Turkish mercenaries from Mongolia, 
 and finally disintegration and the formation of new dynas- 
 ties in all parts of the empire, were the natural result. This 
 rapid downfall was aided by the bitter strife between the 
 two court parties, Arab and Persian, in which the former 
 naturally had to yield its prestige to superior power of 
 intrigue, and especially by the larger controversy on the 
 question of legitimacy in the succession, — the Arabs in- 
 sisting on the old tribal rights of the people to take part in 
 the choice of a representative of the Prophet, the Persians, 
 more successfully, on their traditional principle of heredi- 
 
MAHOMET. 68 1 
 
 tary government. The efifect of this was not to strengthen 
 the central authority, but to weaken and ultimately destroy 
 it; there being no check left upon incompetency and no 
 right of revolutions against a pernicious line of rulers in 
 the caliphate itself; while in the several provinces, on the 
 other hand, there was no check on the power of a rebel- 
 lious governor to seize a subordinate throne, and compel 
 or bribe the weak spiritual head at Bagdad to grant him 
 the investiture required. By the time that Europe poured 
 herself out on Asia, in the Crusades, Turkish and Mongol 
 and Berber dynasties had risen to the side of the gorgeous 
 and feeble Abbasides on the Euphrates, each with its rival 
 court, its retinue of statesmen, scholars, poets, its broad 
 schemes of ambition, reaching sometimes, as in Mahmud 
 of Ghazni and the western Almoravides, at the subjugation 
 of all neighboring States. 
 
 Iran, meanwhile, had become the theatre of anarchical 
 wars and dynastic revolutions, of devastation and preda- 
 tory raids. Heavy taxes for the support of petty courts, 
 heavy duties on travel and trade, drove multitudes into ex- 
 ile or open plunder. To these influences were added dread- 
 ful pestilences, of which forty were enumerated as falling 
 within four hundred years, due largely to wars. Never 
 probably did a race possess so little capacity for orderly, 
 constructive government as the Semitic Arab. At the 
 touch of the great Mongol invasions his splendid struc- 
 ture, that had arisen by the genius and wealth of Persia 
 upon the great homestead of autocratic empires, — Assy- 
 rian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, — vanished like a mirage 
 of the desert whence it was born. 
 
 But these political incapacities did not weaken the pres- 
 tige of Islam as a faith or a name. That all-conquering 
 name covered the multitude of races, of sects, of strifes, of 
 sovereignties, all alike, and took no heed of their rise and 
 fall. Nothing so simple, nothing so inclusive, nothing so 
 
682 ISLAM. 
 
 susceptible of ever-fresh interpretation was ever known, so 
 long as the mind of man was content to stay within the 
 limits of the worship of personal Will. And this is equiva- 
 lent to saying, as long as Iran was Iran; and so the 
 Semitic Arab, planted in that cradle of the Will, must 
 expand his petty national prejudices to accept the life 
 and thought of a mighty Aryan empire. 
 
 This principle of a central Will amidst all the antago- 
 nisms of Persian and Arab, and in the miserable subjec- 
 tion of the spiritual to the temporal arm, essential to that 
 unity of the two which Islam established, was the com- 
 mon ground, the universal appeal, and, so far as its limits 
 allowed, the reconciling power. Here is another witness, 
 in addition to Buddhism, that other religions besides Chris- 
 tianity can adapt themselves, by force of their central prin- 
 ciples, to immense varieties of human experience, treating 
 them as waves that rise and sink in mid-ocean ; or as days 
 in the march of centuries. 
 
 That again and again in his sublime evolution man has 
 laid hold upon supposed transcendent relations with what 
 is above him ; that he has surrendered one system only to 
 find and adhere to another, till, its day ended, still another 
 has serenely and irresistibly risen on him like a new dawn, 
 after whatsoever night-shadows lighted by unchanging 
 stars, — is the inexhaustible word of history, of which a 
 new syllable is preparing to-day. 
 
 Intolerance towards rival positive religions obviously lay 
 in the very nature and necessity of Islam. Its God, and 
 its God only, had for it an objective reality; and for it 
 alone the subjective limits and conditions of all theologi- 
 cal conceptions were supposed to be miraculously set aside. 
 The temporal arm was master of thought in the name of 
 religion ; and the Church, leaning on the power of that 
 arm which has increased down to the present day, is fully 
 in the hands of the State. The form of pure personal Will, 
 
MAHOMET. 683 
 
 under which this unconditioned Being was conceived, 
 made Him precisely analogous to a political and military- 
 autocrat. 
 
 It was the positive prohibition of idolatry by this Divine 
 Will which created the persecutions of Christians in the 
 first century of the caliphate. P'or example, Walid the 
 great unifier of Islam cut down Christian images in Jeru- 
 salem, and shut out Christians from worshipping with the 
 Mahometans in the city, but at the same time gave them 
 three churches for themselves. The later Abbaside caliphs 
 destroyed Christian basilicas, or turned them into mosques ; 
 and Motawakkil cut in two the consecrated cypress of 
 Zoroaster. Many of the monsters of cruelty, however, who 
 have overrun Persia in later times, — like Tamerlane, Nadir 
 Shah, MahmCid the Afghan, and Agha Mohammed,^ — were 
 mere barbarian conquerors, who were seeking, not the glory 
 of Islam, but their own. For the cruelties attending the 
 wars of Islam with Christianity in the Middle Ages, neither 
 side can claim superiority in respect to its fanatical mad- 
 ness. Certainly the Crusaders were a set of savages driven 
 on by crazy priests ; while some of the Mahometan princes 
 of that period were noble and tolerant, until goaded into 
 rage by the Christian invaders.^ 
 
 The sanguinary outbreaks of cruelty and fanaticism 
 which have made the name of Islam a terror in all ages, 
 are doubtless due in part to the impulse given to brutal 
 passions by a religion of autocratic Will. But we must 
 not mistake the effects of individual and tribal passions, in 
 which religion had little concern, for the fanatical hatred 
 of rival gods; against these gods the confessors of Islam 
 were bound to war. Still, this fanaticism has not prevented 
 an astonishing freedom of mind under its name.^ 
 
 1 Braun : GemaJde d. Moliam. IVelt., pp. 246-253. 2 gge Braun, p. 214. 
 
 For Mahmud of Ghazni's destruction of books, — forty thousand ass-loads of heresy, — 
 Hammer-Piirgstall, i. Ixvii. Omar probably did not burn the Alexandrian library. For 
 .jzid's horrible sack of Medina, see Ockley p. 426. 
 
684 ISLAM. 
 
 Of course the sense of such direct personal relations, held 
 firm by a written revelation, while for centuries it was edu- 
 cating races, grew more and more into one form of reli- 
 gious fanaticism whose cruel outbursts are as frequent as 
 they are frightful. This proverbial barbarity of the Moslem 
 is the natural result, not of a specially savage temperament, 
 nor of unbridled passions, but of the direct reference of 
 conduct to an exclusive personal Will. It was true of all 
 Semitic races whose religion was intensely personal, except 
 where, as in later forms of Christianity, the secular forces 
 of commercial, scientific, and oecumenical life have con- 
 trolled its operation. 
 
 Moslem orthodoxy was simply the legitimate evolution 
 of that central principle which w^e have defined, applied to 
 cosmical, psychological, and all morally and spiritually vital 
 questions ; and in all religions, orthodoxy much more 
 justly claims this logical legitimacy than is commonly ad- 
 mitted by those who wish to retain the prestige of the 
 religious name while they follow tracks that properly be- 
 long outside of it. For orthodoxy really represents the 
 long experience of ages seeking faithfully to adjust and 
 evolve the primal principles of its founder; and what it 
 calls heresy is wont to show a greater divergence from 
 these primal principles than from its own, whether ad- 
 mitted to do so or not; and herein consists its progress. 
 But as in human character personal will takes by its very 
 freedom a vast variety of shapes equally justified by the 
 conscience, so in Islam, where such will is the highest 
 religious principle, even the Koran and its Ulemas, with 
 the schools of Koranic jurisprudence and government, 
 have never been able to suppress the tendency to admit a 
 vast range of discussion, inquiry, and opinion, more or less 
 inconsistent with its own exclusiveness as a revelation. 
 
 No religion, not even Christianity, has equalled Islam in 
 the extent to which it has been stretched and strained by 
 
MAHOMET. 685 
 
 the push of free-thought from within its name and pro- 
 fessed communion. Great princes in every Hne and land 
 have continually sought to crown their conquests and glory 
 by uniting sects and faiths upon liberal thought. And even 
 where the impulse has pressed through all bounds to a 
 point so far distant as the higher pantheism of the Sufis 
 is from the definite externality of the Koranic Allah, — the 
 name of Islam has seldom been either dropped or refused. 
 Internal persecution has, as we have seen, been not so 
 much in the name of Islam or its Prophet as from personal 
 political, dialectic, or interpretative considerations. The 
 finest thing about this religion is the expansiveness of its 
 name. It is not labelled for any individual, it is not called 
 from Mahomet, as Christianity from Christ; it is Islam, or 
 Obedience. Its unity of God is not marred by duality or 
 trinity of persons, each with his own absolute claim ; and 
 for this very reason the multiplicity of incarnations, which 
 we have already noted as resulting from the worship of 
 personal Will, can stand side by side under its common 
 name, with equal recognition as portions of Islam, however 
 unorthodox or mutually repugnant. The immeasurable 
 conception of Divine Unity and Universality absorbs these 
 separated will-forms, as stars are lost in the infinity of the 
 common heavens. And as the mystical capabilities of this 
 conception came into play, even the limits natural to the 
 religion of personal sovereignty themselves melted away, 
 and the path opened to a still freer spiritual aspiration. 
 Such is the meaning of Mussulman Sufism ; it is traceable 
 to the ideal significance of Unity, naturally evolved to a 
 point beyond that identification of it with definite monothe- 
 istic personality which constituted Islam, as it did Chris- 
 tianity and Judaism, a positive religion. 
 
 Two elements in the ethnic constitution of Islam made 
 the play of free thought inevitable. The first was the in- 
 tellectual scepticism and spiritual indifference of the Arab, 
 
686 ISLAM. 
 
 noticeable alike in his desert epoch and in his openness to 
 those Persian and Greek influences which undermined the 
 Semitic semi-barbarism of his days of fire and sword. The 
 other was that nervous, subtle individuality and that per- 
 ceptive keenness which underlie the extreme apparent 
 respect for political legitimacy in the Persian mind. It is 
 easy to see that this combination of qualities, when brought 
 under the motive force of an all-pervading religious law, 
 would produce a great number of independent and tenta- 
 tive minds. It is not strange that every postulate of the 
 faith was probed to its foundations, or reconciled with 
 reason by a scholastic process. Equally natural were the 
 theological subtleties and verbal artifices by which these 
 lawless investigations were made to appear consistent with 
 an authoritative faith. The spirit of compromise in the 
 reconciliation of opposites was never more freely used. 
 The art of manipulating Og's bedstead belongs to every 
 positive religion, though the instrumentalities are not 
 always so convenient as is this singular union of the Arab 
 and Persian. 
 
 Other influences of a nature favorable to religious and 
 philosophical freedom proceeded from the ease with which 
 Islam was propagated among a great variety of races, all 
 of whom brought their special gifts and demands to the 
 common sovereignty. Did our space admit, it would be 
 interesting to trace the multifarious achievements of the 
 great Turkish dynasties which arose in eastern Iran, the 
 marvellous life that seemed to spring up in those barbarian 
 hordes of the North at the touch of the old soil of Avestan 
 heroes, of Achaemenide and Sassanian kings, and the seats 
 of an immemorial culture which had never known inter- 
 ruption or decay, — dynasties that associate the discredited 
 name of Turk with such world-famous lines as the Ghazne- 
 vide, the Seljurk, the Kadjar; dynasties some of which 
 have proved more capable than the Arabs of maintaining 
 
MAHOMET. 687 
 
 splendid empires, cultivating art and letters, and advancing 
 scientific discovery; ^ dynasties to which, in fact, the Arabs 
 owe much of their historic fame. The range of differing 
 qualities which we are now enumerating must cover the 
 destructive instincts of the Afghan and Mongol conquer- 
 ors, which at least show what inclusive powers have resided 
 in the name of Islam. In Africa, the Berbers, a native race, 
 supplied unexpected access of free energy, and down to the 
 eleventh century were the source of Mussulman culture on 
 that continent.^ 
 
 Besides the hosts of native Persian scholars, statesmen, 
 moralists, devotees, who were absorbed into the com- 
 munion of Islam, we must take into our view the external 
 impulse given to it by Zoroastrian traditions, whether of 
 the orthodox or heretical (Zendik) sort, prevailing among 
 the Parsi fire-worshippers, whom the Arabs superseded, 
 but for a long while did not wholly eradicate. To these 
 we must add the subtle yet unextinguished influence of 
 old eclectic schools of pure heretics, seeking to build a 
 universal faith out of the fragments of floating creeds, such 
 as those of Mani and of Mazdak in the west of Iran, es- 
 pecially in Babylon, and the Vedantic and Buddhist mys- 
 tics spread w^idely over the east. From India to Greece, 
 the choicest literature of the Oriental world poured into 
 the courts of the Moslem kings from Ghazni to Bagdad, 
 from Euphrates to the Himalaya, and were wrought up by 
 poets and scholars, — too many of them paid hirelings and 
 adulators of power, but great numbers, on the other hand, 
 bold unflinching servants of genius, and martyrs in its 
 cause. It was a passionate rivalry in poetic, philosophic, 
 and literary culture, such as can only be explained by the 
 prodigious confluence of tribes and traditions under a com- 
 
 1 Gibbon : Roman Empire, li., Ivii. Braun : Gemiilde, etc. Gobineau : Histoire des 
 Perses, ii. 4S2. Malcolm : History of Persia. 
 
 2 Hellwald : CidUirgeschichte, p. 50S. Vamb^ry : Bokhara. 
 
688 ISLAM. 
 
 mon ideal, — an ideal whose properly illimitable central 
 principle of the unity of God was forever struggling to 
 expand beyond the limits of personal sovereignty which 
 constituted it a positive religion. 
 
 We must not conceal the inevitable tendency of all these 
 circumstances — the natural qualities of the conquering and 
 the conquered races, the rapidity and superficiality of the 
 conversion of the Persians, their sense of oppression and 
 wrong, their consciousness of a broader culture subjected 
 to authoritative faith, the intermixture of revolutionary and 
 political aims with all speculative or religious discussion, 
 the temptations and terrors of arbitrary power — to produce 
 a very great amount of intellectual' as well as practical dis- 
 honesty, and to prepare the Avay for that unhappy gift of 
 insincerity which is generally ascribed to the modern in- 
 habitants of Iran. Such effects were often aggravated by 
 the very elasticity with which, as we have seen, the name 
 of Islam could be stretched to cover a freedom of thought 
 inconsistent with its principles, requiring continual half- 
 sincerities of adjustment and interpretation. This, in every 
 religion, is the beginning — or it is rather the open track 
 — of degeneracy and decay. It is the negative sign that a 
 new day is dawning for the mind and soul, which should 
 not be restrained from seeking to escape the clouds of 
 yesterday ; that the new wine is fermenting, and that those 
 who guard the old bottles succeed in holding it only so far 
 as they can suppress its nobler qualities. In Islam this 
 was done more by political and military power than by 
 the superior consistency of orthodoxy. Yet here also we 
 must not go too far. There was a sense in which what has 
 just been said of the excellence of Islam by reason of the 
 expansive quality of its name is grandly true. Not all 
 the noble thought which its wide reach of possible mean- 
 ing permitted it to cover beyond the stiffness of definite 
 creeds was unworthily held or compromised. And it is as 
 
MAHOMET. 689 
 
 creditable to a positive religion to possess a reach of in- 
 clusive capacity as it is discreditable to it to maintain its 
 failing prestige by the two-faced worship of a name on 
 the part of confessors who have long outgrown its possi- 
 ble meaning. 
 
 The Mongol hordes which swept dow^n upon the emas- 
 culated caliphate in the thirteenth century were descended, 
 according to their own myths, from four male and female 
 survivors of a mutual slaughter of tribes, or from a child 
 rescued thence, and suckled by a she-wolf^ To the end 
 of their career they tore one another in pieces by domestic 
 feuds. The Mussulman historian says of them that they 
 had all the qualities of beasts, — " heart of lion, patience 
 of dog, caution of crane, cunning of fox, prudence of crow, 
 rapacity of wolf, vigilance of cock, domestic carefulness of 
 fowls, slyness of cat, fury of boar." ^ Their instinct was to 
 devastate the fruits of civilization, the results of history; 
 their only constructive impulse, to rally round a human 
 God and to conquer the world. They were lazy, filthy, 
 intemperate, treacherous, lustful.^ They cut off heads, 
 piled them in heaps, standing a corpse head downwards 
 for every ten thousand victims.* They massacred thou- 
 sands of men and women at the graves of their Khans.^ 
 They slew the wife and buried her with her husband, and 
 drank human blood with relish.'^ Of these semi-human 
 monsters the fit insignia were the " Lion and the Cat." 
 Their name was symbolic of the terror they caused. In 
 Persian, Mongol is said to mean "gloomy; " in I\IongoIian, 
 "haughty" and "terrible." The hoofs of these Centaurs 
 trod the cities of the East — old Bokhara and Balkh, Merv 
 and Bagdad, Damascus and Aleppo — into bloody dust; 
 and Europe trembled at the noise of their coming as at 
 
 ' Kleproth, quoted in Wiittke, i. 225. 2 Hammer : Gesch. d. Hchane, i. 44 (WassaQ. 
 
 s Wiittke, i. 248. * Hammer, i. 48. 
 
 6 Wiittke, i. 232. Marco Polo, bk. i. chap. xlvi. * Hammer, i. 44. 
 
 44 
 
690 ISLAM. 
 
 the judgment trump. No prayer, nor prestige, nor bribe 
 availed when the terrified cahph of Bagdad offered his 
 treasures to the grandson of Genghis Khan for the safety 
 of his city. Hulagu repHed, " My help is in my God, not 
 in gold." To Nassir, king of Aleppo, he said : " Woe, 
 woe to all who fight not on our side ; for we bring de- 
 struction on the earth ! God has torn pity and mercy 
 from our hearts." ^ Their theory was that a vanquished 
 enemy could never become the victor's friend, and should 
 be exterminated. Genghis destroyed all his captives be- 
 fore leaving Iran. It is estimated that eighteen millions 
 of lives were destroyed by these hordes in China and Tan- 
 gut alone.2 
 
 Yet these bestial human hordes were not by any means 
 destitute of religion. They had got so far as to recognize 
 some Supreme Life at the root, or at the head, of the world ; 
 and later science gathers proof of such representatives of 
 a highest from all parts of that immeasurable hive from 
 which they swarmed, — some Sublime One,^ to whom the 
 worshipped plants, beasts, stars, elements pointed on. 
 Buddhism must already have done something to stir the 
 seeds of reflection. Judaism and Christianity had long 
 been penetrating these wilds in one form or another. 
 The great Khans were not ignorant of what the races and 
 nations believed. They knew enough to count it all 
 equally insignificant beside the instinct of personal sway. 
 The immediate effect of Islam upon the converted descen- 
 dants of Genghis was not unlike that of the Buddhist and 
 Nestorian missions upon the original fetichistic theism of 
 the steppes; it was simply to expand their natural un- 
 impressibility to spiritual influence into a half-sceptical, 
 half-believing impartiality.'* This is a constant phenom- 
 enon amidst their most barbarous political and military 
 
 ^ Hammer, i. 173. - Howorth: History cf the Mongols, i. 113. 
 
 8 Marco Polo, bk. i. chap, xlviii. * Abulfeda: HUtOTy o/tlie Tartars, passim. 
 
MAHOMET. 691 
 
 atrocities. Occasionally, as in Kublai Khan, it rises into a 
 higher sense of rational liberty, preventing the Khan from 
 joining even the Christian communion, while he showed 
 deep respect to all the great positive faiths ; and Rubru- 
 quis and Sir John Mandeville testify to his clear insight 
 into the narrowness and insincerity of Christian professions 
 and the moral force of his rebuke.^ But these children of 
 instinct exhibited other hopeful inconsistencies with their 
 nomadic barbarism. The same impartiality in many re- 
 spects characterized their treatment of the sexes ; women 
 having an influence in political and domestic affairs, and 
 also in trade, rare in the East.^ The wives of the Mongol 
 princes gave away thrones, determined successions, recon- 
 ciled armies, ruled States, sat on all public occasions beside 
 the throne;^ and Hammer-Purgstall even ascribes the 
 short duration of the Mongol empire to the constant inter- 
 ference of female relatives in every act of government. 
 These princes were chosen without regard to race or reli- 
 gion ; and their Christian wives and mothers have per- 
 haps received even too much credit for the good works 
 of their lords and masters. Of the same nature were the 
 marks of democratic freedom in the election of the Khan. 
 He was to be the absolute lord ; yet the chiefs had to be 
 brought together and formally consulted, and signified 
 assent by casting their caps into the air in sign of free- 
 dom, and their girdles over their shoulders in sign of sub- 
 mission.^ So if the Khan had violated the unchangeable 
 laws of the tribes, he was deposed in presence of the gov- 
 ernors, and of the wives and nobles and officers generally.^ 
 The last ceremony was the oath of absolute submission to 
 the one God on earth, and to the one purpose of universal 
 sway he came to fulfil. 
 
 1 Rubruquis, pp. 156-164. 3 Marco Polo, bk. ii. chap, xlviii. 
 
 3 Gesch. d. Ilchafie, i. 12, S4 ', ii. 25, 271 (Wassaf). 
 
 * Hammer, i. 49, 57. ^ Ibn Batuta, xiii. 
 
692 ISLAM. 
 
 In these customs and institutions we may, I think, easily 
 recognize the causes of that negative form of impartiality 
 in religion which they so curiously resemble. It is a low 
 form of universality, into which the natural aspiration for 
 unity is beaten or flattened out, like gold leaf, in a com- 
 mon level of subjection to one personal Will, beside which 
 all distinctive claims arc trivial. Other negative prepar- 
 ations for Persian influence must also be admitted. There 
 were wide-open neutralities involved in the great conflux 
 of races and beliefs which the early Khans had brought 
 to their capitals, — possibilities at least of foothold for the 
 imperishable wisdom of Iran and Cathay. For the very 
 nature of such treasures is to live over changing civiliza- 
 tions, as the sun lives through varying days and months 
 and years. But these preparations were unconscious. 
 There was no constructive or preserving purpose in the 
 overwhelming raids ; no idea but to supplant the insti- 
 tutions of ancient States by the edicts of despotic Will. 
 We recall even Mahmud of Ghazni's enormous holocaust 
 of books in eastern Iran, and Ilulagu's annihilation of the 
 libraries of Bagdad, Alamut, and Medina in the West. Ibn 
 Batuta says a line of witnesses proved that in the Tartar 
 wars in Irak twenty-four thousand literary micn perished, 
 and only two escaped.^ After the sack of Bokhara, the 
 same author tells us it nearly disappeared, and he himself 
 could find no one who knew anything of science in this 
 ancient city whose name meant " seat of learning." ^ The 
 horrible massacres perpetrated by Timur in Aleppo and 
 Damascus, while he was himself discussing theology with 
 doctors of the law, would be perhaps the most barbarous 
 in history,^ but for the more dreadful ones by Genghis 
 Khan in Merv and Nishapur and Bamian, which were de- 
 populated and turned to deserts.* Of fourteen viziers 
 
 1 Ibn Batuta, chap. xiii. - Hutton : Cetitral Asia, p. 115. 
 
 s Howorth, i. S6-90. * Hammer -. Gesch. d. Ilcharie, ii. 343-347- 
 
MAHOMET. 693 
 
 during the first century of the Mongol invasion, only one 
 died a natural death. Timur slaughtered one hundred 
 thousand prisoners in the neighborhood of Delhi, in or- 
 der to get them out of his way. 
 
 Such were the " locust swarms" that lighted on Persia 
 from the Altai steppes ; but the touch of the soil trans- 
 formed them into men, and that intellectual and aesthetic 
 culture which had been its immemorial harvest was unin- 
 terrupted. It will in part account for this mystery if we 
 recall in the light of recent researches one element in the 
 Mongol and Turkish experience which has been generally 
 overlooked. During the pre-Islamic period and in Central 
 Asia there had gone on a mighty intermingling of tribes 
 throughout that great region beyond the Oxus whence 
 the Mongol invaders came. The Zoroastrian temples had 
 spread from Bactria over Sogdiana and Khahrezm, and the 
 famous temple in Nubehar was the centre of the fire-worship 
 borne by the Barmecides into the courts of the Abbaside 
 caliphs.^ The Arabic authors point to astronomical and 
 other scientific attainments in these regions, in very remote 
 times, and to inscriptions which excited the profound in- 
 terest of the Islamic conquerors. Turkish names are as 
 prevalent as Aryan in the oldest records of the Bactrian 
 and neighboring cities. Even the names of Balkh and 
 Bokhara are Turkish. When to these facts we add Budd- 
 hist and Christian influences known to have been at work, 
 the former from the third century before, the latter from the 
 fourth century after, the Christian era, we cannot regard the 
 ground as wholly unprepared for the seeds of Iranian and 
 Western civilization. In fact, we know that the Mahome- 
 tans had to maintain long and serious struggles against the 
 followers of Buddha and Zoroaster in Bokhara ; and it 
 seemed necessary to allow the Koran to be read in Persian 
 instead of Arabic, contrary to the most sacred usage. 
 
 1 Vambery {Bokliara, p. 6), according to Masudi.. 
 
694 ISLAM. 
 
 Nothing, for instance, could have been more favorable 
 to the extension of civilization among the Mongols than 
 the century and a half of Samanide rule in Central Asia, 
 especially that portion of the period in which Bokhara, 
 Balkh, Samarkand, and all the great seats of antique cul- 
 ture were under the government of Ismail, the chief of the 
 dynasty, whose reign is perhaps the one most deserving of 
 honor in the whole Islamic history of Central Asia. He 
 was a prince of pure Iranian blood, descendant of Saman, 
 a fire-worshipper, who became Islamic out of gratitude to 
 a neighboring prince. His dynasty was the last great 
 Iranian rule in ancient Iran, and fertile in the highest 
 civilization. Bokhara became the queen of cities, seat of 
 purest Persian culture, as famous for silk manufactures as 
 for works and men of genius. Ismail died at the end of 
 the third century of the Hegira (a.d. 907). His reign saw 
 the establishment of the great theological schools of the 
 Sunna, to which flocked all the religious scholarship of 
 Islam, while all neighboring tribes and kingdoms, north 
 and south, paid eminent respect to this real metropolis of 
 Asiatic culture,^ whose traditions went back to the fire- 
 temple of Zoroaster. The days of the Turkish and Mon- 
 gol dynasties were the great days of Iranian poetry and 
 thought. This was not the result of conversion to Islam. 
 Most of these princes were unbelievers ; they had neither 
 the culture nor the narrowness of the Moslem ; or they 
 were like the great Genghis, — at one moment listening 
 with respect to Mussulman teachers, at another flinging 
 the Koran under his horse's feet. The Seljurk dynasty had 
 scarcely brought the feeble caliphate under its control, 
 when it began a splendid career. Togrul Beg was a legis- 
 lator whose work endured. The literary laurels of the 
 Ghaznevides of the East were rivalled in its courts, and 
 their conquests in its campaigns. Who has not heard of 
 
 * Vdmb^ry : Bokhara-, pp. 29, 30, 65-87. 
 
MAHOMET. 695 
 
 the splendid reign of Alp Arslan, the lover of letters and 
 science, around whose throne stood twelve hundred princes 
 and two hundred thousand soldiers,^ and whose magna- 
 nimity could eclipse the victory which brought a Roman 
 emperor captive to his feet? "You who have seen the 
 story of Alp Arslan exalted to heaven, come to Merv and 
 see it buried in the dust," was his epitaph. But a true 
 central sun of this court was the world-famed vizier, Nizam- 
 ul-Mulk, a Persian, — the oracle and patron of religion and 
 science, and the defender of justice and humanity for thirty 
 years; ^ whose beneficence, it was said, extended from Jeru- 
 salem to Samarkand, so that in that whole vast empire there 
 was no scholar, no student, no devotee, whom his munifi- 
 cent care did not reach.^ The same rare genius directed 
 the illustrious reign of the next Seljurk prince, Malik, the 
 Charlemagne of Asia, and fell a victim to court intrigues 
 at its close. " The palace of Malik," says Gibbon, " re- 
 sounded with the songs of a hundred poets." The accu- 
 mulated errors of centuries were set aside by a new 
 astronomical era, the crown of the science of that time. 
 Order and security prevailed throughout Iran ; and no less 
 universal was the zeal of all classes in matters intellectual, 
 industrial, and social. 
 
 The struggle of old propensities in these Turanic kings 
 with the civilizing power of Iran was illustrated in the last 
 of the Seljurks, who riding intoxicated at the head of his 
 army, shouting the verses of Firdusi, was hewn down and 
 slain. Hulagu himself,* who broke in pieces this wonder- 
 ful Turkish dynasty with his northern hordes, sent the 
 greatest astronomer, metaphysician, and physician of his 
 time, Nassir-ed-Din of Tus, as his ambassador, and set 
 that scientist, with four others, to construct an observatory 
 at Damascus. When he destroyed the library of the As- 
 
 ^ Abul Ghazi, pt. iii. chaps, xiv. xix. 2 Gibbon : Roman. E7npire, chap. Ivii. 
 
 s Kremer : Hcrrsck. d. Gesch., p. 438. * Braun : Gemalde, etc., p. 224. 
 
696 ISLAM. 
 
 sassins at Alamut, he preserved the Koranic Hterature, and 
 all works of higher science; only burning up the theology 
 of the sect without mercy. His son and successor Abaka, 
 equally famous as a ruler and as a conqueror, who so un- 
 learned his Mongol habits that his armies trod out no 
 grain-field on the march and destroyed no fruit/ yet died 
 of his passion for strong drink,^ owed the glory of his 
 reign to his Persian ministers ; one of whom, Ald-ed-Din, 
 poet as well as statesman, after long service, was sent into 
 exile for his inability to gratify the avarice of his master, 
 and for his honorable self-respect.^ The next of the line 
 was Arghun, a Buddhist relic-worshipper and semi-Sha- 
 manist, following sorcerers to procure long life; who never- 
 theless knew that his viziers must be men honored in the 
 land and acquainted with its culture, and chose such with- 
 out regard to race or religion. One of these was Saad, a 
 Persian Jew, hailed by his co-religionists as Messiah, and 
 lauded by the native poets ; famous for good works, but a 
 target for court conspiracies, like the rest. In this reign 
 was learned the financial lesson of the terrible results of 
 paper extension, and the return to gold was celebrated 
 by sayings of wisdom which modern experience cannot 
 surpass.* 
 
 Last comes Ghazan, signalizing his conversion from 
 peaceful Buddhism or Mongol Deism to Islam by a 
 bloody persecution of all other religions," then converted 
 again into the greatest of the Asiatic Khans, mainly 
 through his minister, Reshid-ed-Din, a Persian Jew of 
 Hamadan, whose name, " the straight path of religion," 
 was fitly given, and partly through his own universal 
 genius, — at once a mechanician and artisan in all kinds, a 
 linguist, patron of all sciences, and centre of all literatures, 
 missions, and correspondence with courts, from India to 
 
 ^ Hammer, i. 272. - Ibid., p. 313. s Ibid., 307. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. 3S4, 385. ^ Hammer-Purgstall, ii. 28-30. 
 
MAHOMET. 697 
 
 Rome, Germany, and France. This is the testimony of 
 the historians of his time.^ His gold coins were the stan- 
 dard of purity, even in Byzantium.^ His pubhc works 
 were innumerable; his example stimulated historical 
 studies into their highest bloom. But his great vizier, 
 who had given thirteen sons to his service, and directed 
 the State for a longer period than any other Persian min- 
 ister, came at last, in a later reign, to share the fate of 
 such greatness, being put to death with extreme cruelty, 
 amidst curses on his head as a Jew.^ Ghazan even emu- 
 lated his ancestor, Genghis, and the great traditional 
 law-giver of Persia, Ardeshir, and Nushirvan, by the 
 compilation of a new code of laws from the old native 
 institutes, mingled with Mongol rules and customs, under 
 the influence at least of the more cultivated of his sub- 
 jects.* By this code were punished the false weigher, the 
 bribed judge, the lawyer who took pay from both sides, 
 the tradesman who sold the same goods twice over. " One 
 hour of justice," it announces, "is worth seventy hours of 
 prayer." Order is secured, intemperance punished, towns 
 made responsible for the robbery of travellers ; debts out- 
 lawed in thirty years ; private houses protected against the 
 trains of travelling officials of all sorts, who had freely 
 quartered themselves on the people before. All firmans 
 and all contracts must be registered ; a Domesday Book 
 carefully regulates taxation ; mail-couriers are everywhere 
 under strict discipline; army-pay is fixed bylaw; slaves 
 are converted into soldiers, and captive bondsmen paid 
 for their labor. Archives are provided for records, copies 
 whereof are engraved on brass or stone. There are laws 
 against usury, which, being resisted, led to the further 
 threat to abolish existing debts entirely. Redeemers of 
 wild land are exempted from taxation. And a new calen- 
 
 1 {Reschtd-ed-din and IVassqf.) Hammer-Purgstall, ii. 14S-160. 
 
 - Ibid., ii. 169. 3 Ibid.jii. 260. * Ibid., ii. 155-174. 
 
698 ISLAM. 
 
 dar is drawn up by the astronomers, dating from Gh^zan's 
 era of 1302. According to Abul Ghazi Khan, he was the 
 first of the Mongol princes who accepted Islam, and com- 
 piled, through his great scholars, a true and full history of 
 the Mongols for the benefit of posterity ; from which work, 
 with others, Abul Ghazi himself derived the materials for 
 his own most valuable history.^ All this is creditable to 
 the follower of the great Genghis after the interval of nearly 
 a century. But by this time the Mongols are well absorbed 
 into the native population ; and while Persian literature 
 and thought continues at its high-water mark, the energies 
 of the race of Hulagu are exhausted. The last of the line 
 was himself a poet and patron of poets, yet the weakest 
 of rulers.^ 
 
 The Mongols in Iran remind us of a vast nebulosity, 
 susceptible of being moulded and condensed into transi- 
 tional systems by the play of forces that long preceded 
 and long outlived them. And this was prefigured in the 
 really great man by whom they were originally set in mo- 
 tion and inspired with unity, and to whom every branch of 
 their tree goes back. Certainly their first barbarous cam- 
 paigns, and the establishment of their thrones put an end 
 to the intellectual life of Asia, for the moment. The great 
 cities, like Bokhara and Samarkand, though rising again 
 into splendor, became seats of a narrower culture, more 
 casuistical, theological, and mystic, than before. The 
 Mongolians, it is said, in explanation of this, destroyed 
 the Iranian population of the towns, and with them the 
 really persistent and gifted classes, both in practical and 
 mental life.^ But it was not long before the infusion of 
 more vital blood quickened much that had lain dead, and 
 brought into play what needed only a more favorable soil. 
 In fact, the Iranian population was effeminate, compared 
 
 * See p. 30 of translation (1730). - Hammer-Purgstall, ii. 270, 311, 312. 
 
 ^ Vambery : Bokhara, p. 138. 
 
MAHOMET. 699 
 
 with these hardy nomads.^ It is to be remembered that 
 the invasions were for the most part undertaken as mihtary 
 reprisals, or in that spirit of destruction which silenced 
 all higher aims. Genghis was led to invade Iran by the 
 assassination of four hundred spies whom he had sent dis- 
 guised as merchants to Otrar, by Sultan Mohammed of 
 Khahrezm (1214).^ His devastation of the older cities was 
 horrible beyond description ; but after all he stands in his- 
 tory for much more than a destroyer. Genghis Khan was 
 a legislator. His laws, indeed, though called unchange- 
 able, were suited to concentrate nomadic tribes upon con- 
 quests, not to serve as statutes of a fixed empire. Born 
 nearly six hundred years after Mahomet, he was the father 
 of political changes almost as tremendous, and seems to 
 have held himself under commission from a God of gods. 
 At his coronation, according to the tradition, a Shaman of 
 the family of his wife, commonly called But Tangri, " the 
 Image of God," and believed to have relations with the 
 Divinity, uttered a revelation bidding him change his name 
 from Tamuzin to Genghis (or the Greatest One).^ The great 
 Mongol historian speaks of him at death as ascending to 
 "Tangri his Father," after pronouncing such noble senti- 
 ments to his wife and sons^as these : " Live in unity, — this 
 endures forever ; the body is born and dies. The soul of 
 every deed is this : to be fulfilled when it is undertaken. 
 His soul is impregnable who holds firmly to his promise. 
 Shape thyself in some degree according to the wishes of 
 others, that you may live in harmony with many." His 
 life, as given by the same authority, is a strange mixture 
 of magnanimity and treachery, of faithfulness to his wife 
 and his early friends, and violent passions prompting to 
 the murder of his own brothers. The truth of his record is 
 as horrible a page of bloodshed and destruction as history 
 
 ^ Vambery : Bokhara, p. 140. 2 Ibid., p. 117. 
 
 « Abul Ghazi, p. 78. 
 
700 ISLAM. 
 
 can 3how,^ giving ample ground for the symbolic legend 
 that he was born with a piece of blood-clot in his hand.^ 
 His laws or prohibitions ^ are against liars, enchanters, 
 thieves, disbelievers in nomadic superstitions, inhospitality, 
 titles, and artificial honors. He allows no precedence but 
 that of merit, freely consorts with his chiefs, and opens his 
 treasury to the whole mass of his followers. His tolera- 
 tion is complete. His armies are disciplined by the great 
 hunts, of immemorial use in Northern Asia. Men are 
 punished for crime with whipping or death; and one of 
 their chief duties is, to be unwashed. Blind obedience to 
 the Khan is the religion of the State, and to point with his 
 finger is to confer an office. All women are at his dis- 
 posal. The succession is hereditary, though to be ratified 
 by the assembly of chiefs, Kuriltai. Ibn Batuta speaks of a 
 law that this assembly shall have the right to depose the 
 Khan if he violate the unchangeable Code of Genghis.^ 
 " Be quiet among yourselves, but swoop on the foe like 
 a hungry hawk." Nothing is more emphasized than the 
 need of unity in families, probably because nothing was 
 more constantly violated. Hence the story of his par- 
 able to his sons of the bundle of rods, which could be 
 broken only by separating them-; and of the two serpents, 
 one with many tails and one head, and the other with one 
 tail and many heads. All religions are equally good and 
 equally subservient to his will ; and all, whether Uighur, 
 Confucian, Buddhist, or Nestorian, bent before it. While 
 that strange master of the world was divining with the 
 shoulder-blade of a ram, traders of tribes and priests of 
 all religions were dwelling at his court in Kara-Korum, 
 amidst the art and riches of all nations from Paris to 
 Cathay.^ Here was a prestige of unity which promised 
 
 1 Hutton: Cen/rai Asia, ch:ip. iv. - De Mailla. 
 
 ^ Hutton. Hammer-Purgstall, i. 22, 23, 36-40. 
 
 * Ibn Batuta, chap. xiii. ^ Hutton : Central Asia, pp. 93-95. 
 
MAHOMET. 701 
 
 some enduring hold on the vast empire which remem- 
 bered the all-embracing sway of Cyrus, of Alexander, of 
 Nushirvan, of the first successors of the Prophet. The 
 Mongol soon exchanged his free Deism for the sway of 
 Mahomet. Ghazan was the first to establish Islam again 
 as the religion of Persia, and the Mongol empire, absorbed 
 into the intellectual genius of Persia, was broken in pieces 
 by her spirit of local independence. Here also the con- 
 queror yielded to the conquered, and their " one world, 
 one Khan," in less than a century had melted into frag- 
 ments before the Sun of Iran. Like children who, when 
 their passionate impulses are satisfied, turn directly to the 
 very opposite extreme of good-nature and good-will, or, 
 we may say, oscillate between destructive and constructive 
 instincts, so the Mongols turned swiftly from their rage to 
 rebuild the deserts they had made. 
 
 Ogotai, the son of Genghis, took the great astronomer, 
 geographer, and statesman of China, Yeliu Chutsai, — a 
 Tartar by origin, a Chinese by education, — to reorganize 
 the empire. This great man " stood like a providence be- 
 tween oppressor and oppressed ; " taught the rude autocrat 
 the Platonic rule to set fit men to all functions, whether 
 of making porcelain or making laws ; and by his medical 
 skill saved countless lives. " We are all travellers here : 
 let us try to live in the memory of men." " We cannot 
 return from the grave : let us lay up our treasures in the 
 people's hearts." In the midst of these horrible days of 
 blood, the great vizier is seen opening the treasures to the 
 poor. He declared that he won his victories by putting 
 each soldier in his proper place and work, and sending 
 dullards to the rear.^ His troops were really better than 
 those of the old empires they invaded. It was the simple 
 fare, the self-reliance, the content in barest necessities (the 
 bottle of milk, the earthen pot and tent, the horse's blood 
 
 ^ Howorth ; Hhtory 0/ Mofigois, i. loS. 
 
702 ISLAM. 
 
 in drought), that gave them the advantage over luxurious 
 mercenaries. They had Greek fire, could mine, and wore 
 better armor than their foes.^ Their obstinacy in besieg- 
 ing towns was invincible. In spite of his intense Islamism, 
 Timur was a great devotee of the code of Genghis, and 
 upheld it against the Mahometan priesthood, and followed 
 Genghis in his military organization of the conquered na- 
 tions. The civil organization was not less perfect.^ 
 
 Then followed a new wave from the same great chaotic 
 ocean. Genghis reappeared in his more terrible political 
 descendant, Timur the "Lame," to reconstruct the vanish- 
 ing unity of the Mongol world, and sway with the same 
 crude forces the sword of destruction and the sovereignty 
 of despotic law. From his throne in Samarkand this Titan 
 of the fourteenth century called into being the greatest 
 empire ever seen in Asia, and seemed to extinguish in his 
 one resistless will the immemorial antagonism of Iran and 
 Turan. Well might the survival of the old native mythol- 
 ogy of the land give his infancy the white hair of sovereign 
 age, which had miraculouly marked the birth of the father 
 of heroes, the mighty Zal. Resembling Genghis in his 
 barbarian instincts, in cruelty, self-indulgence, lust, and ab- 
 solutely unlimited ambition, he possessed other qualities 
 which grew out of a closer acquaintance than his ancestors 
 haci with the wealth and culture of Iran. The legend that 
 he vowed in his childhood, under prescience of greatness, 
 to destroy no human life, points to Buddhistic influence.^ 
 He had other great instincts of justice and truth, and a 
 munificence past all parallel, doing nothing save on the 
 most prodigious scale, like an incarnate omnipotence. He 
 was a patron of science and poetry, himself fond of the 
 society of the scholars and artists of his day, an author as 
 well as a legislator of no mean order. He is believed to 
 
 * Howorth, ii. 62. Also Marco Polo. 2 VamWry, p. 173. 
 
 8 Markham : History of Persia, p. 185. 
 
MAHOMET. 703 
 
 have improved or altered the game of chess. His works 
 of rehgious art in Persia and India were magnificent, and 
 his vast system of colonization filled the great cities of 
 eastern Asia, especially Samarkand, with the splendor of 
 all arts and sciences known to the West.^ Such a specta- 
 cle was never seen before or since, — camps of ten thousand 
 tents, gorgeous and sweeping, surrounded by shops, trades, 
 and all the luxuries of the world ; of a splendor like that of 
 the " Arabian Nights ; " athletics, jousts, elephant-games.^ 
 Yet he is himself described as plutiged in sensual excesses 
 and savage caprices, and his court as a scene of wild was- 
 sail, in which the ambassadors of European States were 
 expected to do their part. He was acquainted with several 
 languages, and his Institutes (modelled largely on those of 
 Genghis) were said to have been wise and strong enough 
 to secure such order throughout his dominions that "'a 
 child might carry a purse of gold everywhere without 
 fear." The merciless destroyer of cities and generations, 
 the petty tyrant who was said to have governed his thirty- 
 six sons with the whip, was seen in far other capacities 
 also ; preserving the mosques, scholars, and hospitals of 
 Bagdad from injury by his troops ; discoursing compHments 
 with the poet Hafiz; building a mosque of forty-eight 
 columns, with ninety trained elephants ; administering pen- 
 alties for crime with perfect impartiality towards rich and 
 poor; and in his Institutes commanding generous treat- 
 ment of suppliant or fallen foes, and following the best of 
 the old Sassanian rules concerning taxation and improve- 
 ment of lands.^ 
 
 Every great event was by this son of destruction per- 
 petuated by some magnificent architectural monument, to 
 construct which artists were colonized from Persia, Syria, 
 
 ^ See Hutton's full account of his court, from the Spanish ambassadors in the beginning 
 of the sixteenth century. Central Asia, chap. vi. 
 
 * Vambery, p. 202. ' Markham: History 0/ Persia, p. 201. 
 
704 ISLAM. 
 
 and the furthest West. Splendid, indeed, they were, with 
 arabesques of blue and gold and glazed mosaic tiles re- 
 flecting back the sun. This annihilator of cities brought 
 the " weavers of Damascus, the cotton-manufacturers of 
 Aleppo, cloth-workers of Angora, goldsmiths of Turkey 
 and Georgia, — clever artisans of every description, — to 
 make Samarkand the emporium of Asiatic trade." This 
 was certainly less of the nature of destruction than of that 
 redistribution of matter in which progress consists.^ 
 
 Again, Timur was a Turk, and put down the Mongol to 
 lift up the Turk, — institutions, language, and all ; and his 
 Turkish revival was intellectual, especially from a religious 
 and mystical point of view. Scholarship was patronized. 
 Colleges in great numbers still excite the wonder of visitors 
 to Bokhara. In fact, the rude Turk established " the most 
 brilliant empire known to the history of Islam, except that 
 of the Omeyyads in Spain and that of the first Abbasides 
 in Arabistan." Djami, master of sciences ; Suhaili, trans- 
 lator of Pilpay ; Ali Shir Amir, defender of Turkish nation- 
 ality against all traducers, and builder of hundreds of 
 benevolent edifices, and above all the writer of the charm- 
 ing and wonderful picture of Oriental beliefs and record 
 of noble thoughts, the Dabistan, — were some of the 
 personal glories of this reign. 
 
 Again the empire of the nomad, reared in a day, dis- 
 appears from the scene at nightfall, like the tents from 
 which it came. With Timur's death begin division and 
 disintegration, and the Uzbeg Tartars and Turcomans 
 sweep over the land. But Iran is not dead. Barber, a 
 child of Genghis's race, but of such higher type as the 
 Mongol could not but win from her traditions, the pupil 
 of the Shah-Nameh as well as the Koran,^ famous for many 
 noble traits, though of the old race of destroying angels, — 
 begins the great Mogul empire in eastern Iran and northern 
 
 1 Gibbon, chap. bcv. * Hutton, chap. vii. 
 
MAHOMET. 705 
 
 India; while Ismail, descendant of an Imam or Sufi saint, 
 sets up a native kingdom in Persia, in the name of All and 
 the Shtites, and expels the Uzbegs from Khorassan ; and 
 with this Soffarian dynasty Persia enters on a new career. 
 In 1600 A.D., if Mainwaring's account of Sir Anthony 
 Sherley's mission to the court of Abbas the Great is to be 
 relied on, notwithstanding many of the old barbarities of 
 absolute power, the country was still kept in such order by 
 that monarch that " a man could travel through it with 
 only a rod in his hand, without any hurt ; and the people 
 were very friendly to strangers," — a contrast to his bar- 
 barous treatment of the Turks in Syria and elsewhere. ^ 
 The swift revival of the Ottoman power of Asia, under 
 Mahomet I. and Amurath, after its utter overthrow by 
 Tamerlane, is evidence of the recuperative force of Mos- 
 lem civilization, if of nothing else. 
 
 So emerge the old traditions, the ineradicable forces of 
 the native genius, above the wastes of the Mongol deluge. 
 One of the strongest evidences of this is in the admiration 
 with which, in spite of his barbarities, the life and deeds of 
 the terrible Timur have been regarded by his Mussulman 
 subjects. 
 
 The work, which passes under the name of " Timur's Life 
 and Institutes," purporting to have been written by himself, 
 is not mentioned by his earliest biographer, Sherif-ed-Din, 
 who wrote at the command of his grandson from journals 
 kept by the great Khan's secretaries. It was found in man- 
 uscript in a library in Yemen ; and the intense devotion to 
 Islam ascribed in it to the great conqueror points strongly 
 to a late origin. It proves, at all events, the impression 
 left by his career on the Mussulman nations. We should 
 be careful, therefore, not to trust too implicitly the ideal 
 picture it draws of his virtues, though many of his most 
 cruel actions in war are not concealed ; and the apparent 
 
 ^ The Three Brothers (London, 1828), pp. 87, 33-40, 67. 
 45 
 
706 ISLAM. 
 
 moral contradictions are such as everywhere strike us in 
 Mongol character. 
 
 The style greatly resembles that of the old Assyrian 
 kings, except in the stronger emphasis on humanity and 
 justice. His invasions are usually justified on the same 
 ground that such and such a nation " rebelled," — in other 
 words, did not accept his assumption of divine right to 
 rule the world. Against unbelievers, especially Sunnites,^ 
 he had a general commission in full to ravage and destroy. 
 He held it his duty to invade every oppressed land and 
 every land divided by heresy.^ It was the cruel oppression 
 of the Uzbeg dynasties towards " the Faithful " that roused 
 him to punish thcm.^ He claims to have been stirred to 
 conquest by a holy Mussulman father,* who predicts his 
 glory, directs his steps, and with commonplaces of ethics 
 and religion purifies his political measures. The burden 
 of his autobiography is: "I acted according to my word ; 
 I regarded the rich as my brethren, the poor as my chil- 
 dren.^ I caused no one to suffer for the guilt of another. 
 Those who had done me injury in battle, when they sued 
 for mercy I received with kindness, and forgot their evil 
 courses, and so treated them that suspicion was plucked 
 out of their hearts. I delivered the oppressed from the 
 hand of the oppressor.^ Khodaudaud once said to me, 
 ' Forgive thine enemy ; but if he then return to enmity, 
 turn him over to the justice of the Almighty.' ^ I associ- 
 ated with the good and learned ; chose out the prophet and 
 the teacher, the philosopher and the historian (not poets). 
 I gained their affections, and entreated their prayers and 
 their support.^ I appointed intelligent reporters in every 
 kingdom to keep me informed of the conduct of the troops 
 and of the people.^ I gave rewards and wages to deserving 
 
 1 Institutes, trans,, p. 359. ^ Ibid., p. 335. ' Ibid., p. 31. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 374. ^ Ibid., pp. i6g, 345. « Jbid., p. 165. 
 
 T Ibid., p. 327. * Ibid., pp. 167, 325. ^ ibid., p. 169. 
 
MAHOMET. 707 
 
 soldiers in their old age.^ I gathered merchants and trav- 
 ellers about me.2 I pardoned all criminals for just of- 
 fences.^ Ministers are not to take bribes or speak evil; 
 they shall do good to the man who doeth evil to them, 
 that he may return to friendship.^ Every one's house 
 should be safe from intrusion by troops ; every one have 
 fair trial before punishment,^ and be protected in his 
 labor." 6 
 
 The extreme minuteness ascribed to his organization, 
 especially of the army, must be founded on historical 
 traditions. His devotion to religion and high morality, 
 whether authentic or not, is certainly intended to be un- 
 exceptionable. He draws omens from the Koran for every 
 act of his life; hears voices proclaiming his coming tri- 
 umph ; seeks in all things to know the will of God ; ' 
 weeps in prayer ; ^ declares that victory is not in numbers, 
 but from above; ^ that every empire not established in 
 morality and religion shall pass away ; ^^ that offices in an 
 earthly empire are symbols of those in the kingdom of 
 God.^^ He resolves to be a king through liberality and 
 generosity and tenderness towards those that have sep- 
 arated themselves from him.^^ 
 
 Here then is a connection between the conquests of the 
 Mongols and the progress of civilization, which Gibbon, 
 in his brilliant summaries of the external facts, does not 
 seem to have divined. Here, too, is full confirmation of 
 the principle of Universal Religion, — that the apparent 
 overturns of civilization by barbarian hordes at the inter- 
 vals of ancient history are really steps of construction. 
 The vitality of ideas and culture is so invincible, that their 
 touch transforms the rudest swarms, the fiercest instincts 
 of human nature, into ministers of natural vigor and stimu- 
 
 1 histitutes, p. 277. 2 Ibid., p. 215. 3 Ibid., p. 219. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. 260, 261, 28s. 5 Ibid., pp. 347, 349. 6 Ibid., p. 213. 
 
 » Ibid., pp. 19, 73, 89, 131. 8 Ibid., p. SI. 9 Ibid., p. 7. 
 
 w Ibid., p. 175. » Ibid., p. 201. 1= Ibid., pp. 55, 63. 
 
708 ISLAM. 
 
 lants of progress. We cannot do better than quote a strik- 
 ing statement of the facts from Mr. Howorth's excellent 
 '* History of the Mongols." Speaking of the results of 
 their conquests, he says : " An afflatus of architectural 
 energy spread over the world almost directly after the 
 Mongol conquests. Poetry and the arts began rapidly to 
 revive. The same thing occurred in Persia under the 
 Ilkhans, the heirs and successors of HCilagu, and in south- 
 ern Russia, at Serai, under the successors of Batu Khan. 
 While in China it would be difficult to point to any epoch 
 of Asiatic history which could rival the vigorous life and 
 rejuvenescence which mark the reign of the great Khubi- 
 lai Khan. . . . As the Mongols controlled the communi- 
 cations between these various centres, and protected them 
 effectually so long as they remained powerful, eastern 
 and western nations were brought together, and reacted 
 on one another. I have no doubt that the art of printing, 
 the mariner's compass, fire-arms, and a great many details 
 of social life were not discovered in Europe, but imported 
 by means of Mongol influence from the farthest East." ^ 
 
 1 Howorth : History of the Mongols., i. xi. 
 
II. 
 
 THE SHAH-NAmEH; OR, BOOK OF KINGS. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH; OR, BOOK OF KINGS. 
 
 TF we may measure the worth of a national epos by the 
 -'- duration of its elements in the love and faith of the 
 nation, and their reach over the phases of its conscious- 
 ness, no poem of this nature can be compared with the 
 Shah-Nameh of Firdusi. The names and legends of its 
 earlier portion belong to the oldest religious mythology 
 of Iran, in its main features outlined two thousand years 
 before this consummate artist wrought their heroic inter- 
 pretation into epical completeness. And he assures us, 
 with an earnestness to which the highest authority must 
 be conceded upon every ground, that he has faithfully 
 adhered to their spirit in the poetic form which they have 
 assumed under his hand.^ The people of Iran received 
 this superb national apotheosis by a follower of Islam as 
 the Athenians received the Jove of Phidias or the Pallas of 
 the Acropolis, — as a real reproduction of their religious 
 and political traditions. To the spaces of time covered 
 by its colossal plan the Homeric period is a vanishing 
 point. It reaches from the earliest to the latest hour of 
 Iranian life, from the first mythic kings to the last Sassan- 
 ide and Tartar and Arab dynasties which succeeded. 
 
 From the gardens of Mahmud of Ghazni, the poet of 
 the tenth Christian century overlooks this immeasurable 
 caravan of the ages, and summons every dear majestic 
 form, as it passes, to bear witness to the heroic ideal, and 
 
 1 That these legends existed substantially as he gives them, in the fifth century (five hun- 
 dred years before), is clear from the Armenian historian, Moses of Chorene. That the same 
 is true of earlier ages, is equally certain from the testimony of the Avesia. And all we can 
 learn in other ways concerning the beliefs of the obscure periods of Persian history, as well as 
 the voice of the nation itself, confirms the conclusion. 
 
712 ISLAM. 
 
 to live anew as a fit constituent of an immortal whole. Far 
 from being, like the Iliad, the fixed picture of an early 
 period transmitted through later social structures, the 
 work of Firdusi was his own creation out of materials 
 which for a thousand years of national vicissitude had 
 been accumulating without structural relations. For ten 
 centuries of national decay they had lived only in the 
 popular heart ; had then been gathered in some rude shape, 
 not now to be discovered, only to be left again with- 
 out protection for hundreds of years more ; finally to be 
 combined with later traditions into one flaming constel- 
 lation, in which all their ethnical phenomena assume the 
 unity of significance which comes only by the idealism of 
 art.i 
 
 The Shah-Nameh is none the less a true history of ancient 
 Iran for the impossibility of connecting its earlier heroic 
 sagas with known personages and events. It is the im- 
 mortal soul of a process whose material form has returned 
 to the dust, and whose details may well be spared in view 
 of the ideal essence so tenderly drawn forth and sacredly 
 guarded by time. The stages of history are of value not 
 as that endless succession of details to which the sensa- 
 tional school would reduce them, but as steps in the 
 evolution of eternal principles, as advancing interpreta- 
 tions of the same all-embracing laws of life recognized 
 successively upon higher and higher planes of human 
 experience. Thus every successive outlook symbolizes a 
 higher in the ascents of spirit, and leads on to it by a 
 necessity which at once resides in the unity of human 
 nature and assures its full expansion. It is the function 
 
 1 The greater part of the Shah-Nameh, derived from the Chodai-Nameh, was wholly 
 unacquainted with actual history. It is thoroughly mythical till it comes down to the Sas- 
 sanian period, and even there it shows a great paucity of historical material, giving mainly 
 ceremonies and sentences ; but as it approaches the later kings of that dynasty, it shows ac- 
 quaintance with both events and persons. Noldeke says that no better connected account of 
 this dynasty has been given than the Chodai-Nameh (p. xix). The Turan wars are believed 
 by Oppert to relate to Media as the scene of the epic, and as inhabited by Turanian tribes. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 713 
 
 of the ideal in history, of what are fitly called the fine arts, 
 to fix and transmit these interpretations of Nature in their 
 pure essence, by a fine elimination of all perishable and 
 confusing details, for the joy and solace and noble culture 
 of mankind. In this sense the Shah-Nameh of Firdusi 
 will be found to contain the whole history of the Iranian 
 mind. 
 
 The attempts of ingenious scholars^ to identify its heroes 
 with Median and Scythian kings, as known to us through 
 Herodotus and other Greek writers, or with the great 
 Achjemenidan line, are based on slight resemblances, on 
 arbitrary etymologies, and on features proceeding from 
 general laws in the structure of the national legend. With 
 the exception of the latest personages of the epos, inclu- 
 sive of Iskander, the theory has no valid application, and 
 is in fact set aside by the obvious derivation of the Shah- 
 Nameh names from those which figure in the old Avesta, 
 and especially in the Vendidad Sade ; and by the fact that 
 legends not found in the Avesta were certainly based on 
 equally antique traditions of the same cycle. Their con- 
 nection with the past is ideal. It is explicable only by 
 the special correspondence of the Iranian mind in the or- 
 der of human progress — as we have endeavored to demon- 
 strate — to the advent of conscious Will, to the entrance 
 of personality among the all-mastering and all-confound- 
 ing forces, natural and social, which preceded it. Iranian 
 life transformed abstract ideas into persons ; turned fatali- 
 ties into living choice and the dualism of the will ; put 
 positive men and women in place of oppressive uniformi- 
 ties of mind or sense. Therefore its psychological his- 
 tory is not a record of saints, like Hindu idealism, nor of 
 mechanical producers, like Chinese positivism ; but a tale 
 of heroes, a Shah-Nameh, semi-myth, semi-history, yet 
 altogether human and personal. The epic of Firdusi is 
 
 1 See Gobineau ; Hisioire des Perses. Malcolm : History 0/ Persia. 
 
714 ISLAM. 
 
 its climax, its supreme type. It involved the full Iranian 
 process, by which every god and every elemental force 
 in old Aryan mythology became a man. The Shah- 
 Nameh names are sons of wondrous lineage. In the 
 Avesta these names were developments of the older 
 Aryan conception of struggle between the Nature-powers 
 of good and evil, light and darkness. The social and polit- 
 ical relations of the Iranian tribes with each other and with 
 neighboring ruder tribes multiplied these figures and raised 
 them into distinct ethical types, represented in family tra- 
 ditions, rhymed histories, natural songs ; held together by 
 the national interpretation of the strife of natural forces as 
 a moral and spiritual — that is, a human, not a merely ele- 
 mental — fact. With the growth of the Zoroastrian cultus, 
 historical persons and events were brought under the more 
 positively religious aspect of Dualism, while the ethical 
 and heroic meanings remained on the whole unchanged. 
 Finally, the glorious nationality of the Sassanidae, and its 
 tragic struggle with the Arab and the Roman, transfused 
 this religious tradition with the pathos of actual historic 
 life. Thus one dominant consciousness of a profound 
 truth, wrought over and over again into fresh forms of ex- 
 perience, has given soul and shape to the great epic of 
 Persia. The sublime idealization of which Firdusi was the 
 outcome was the unbroken evolution of twenty centuries. 
 
 Long before the Sassanian revival, probably long before 
 the great Achasmenidan days, these antique personalities 
 had been the inspiration and solace of the national heart ; 
 and in that social disintegration which lasted through the 
 Seleucide and Parthian dynasties, they were the refuge 
 of the vigorous tribes of eastern Iran, which never came 
 wholly under the power of the invaders. In them these 
 tribes cherished the true Iranian ideal of individual Will, — 
 Titanic forces of personal independence and moral ardor, 
 forever fated to noble strife. It was a splendid task which 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 715 
 
 their discouraged instinct was pursuing, in a purely ideal 
 sphere, when all support of national unity and promise was 
 apparently withdrawn forever; and it has been their re- 
 ward to be immortalized in the tribute of that very race 
 and religion that seemed to have swept them into oblivion ; 
 for Firdusi was a Mahometan, like the Ghaznevide mon- 
 arch who chose him for this sublime function, but the 
 Persian ideals had overswept the poet's soul. A thousand 
 years had passed since these isolated Eastern tribes had 
 passed under Arab and Tartar dynasties. Through all 
 these centuries they had gained the ascendency over their 
 masters to higher cultures ; and at last it was for one 
 mighty birth to show all coming ages how they had seized 
 upon these rude Centaurs, inspired them with splendid 
 ideals, and by their own life in death lifted them into an 
 immortal sphere. Such the message of the Shah-Nameh 
 to mankind. 
 
 Before proceeding to a fuller statement of what we have 
 called the dominant idea of this epic, some account must 
 be given of its immediate origin. 
 
 It is the merit of the Sassanian kings to have brought 
 the national legends together, probably the oldest of them 
 out of eastern Iran, and compiled a kind of prose chroni- 
 cle, known under the different titles of " Basitan-Nameh " 
 (Ancient Book), and "Khodai-Nameh" (Book of Kings or 
 Gods).^ The real depositaries of these local or tribal tra- 
 ditions were, however, the proprietary chiefs {Dihkdndn), — 
 a territorial aristocracy who preserved their social pride 
 and influence through all the vicissitudes of the nation 
 down to the latest caliphs. Their title reflects the spirit 
 of the Avesta, for Dihkan has the sense of cultivator as 
 well as chronicler. Firdusi tells us that it was from this 
 class of persons that he derived the best information, and 
 his references to them are frequent, as of final authority .^ 
 
 1 Mohl : Shdh-Nameh, \. x. * Ibid., xlvii. 
 
•Jl6 ISLAM. 
 
 Among these chiefs we have reported the name of Da- 
 nishvar as compiler of the Basitan-Nameh by command 
 of the last Sassanide king (a. d. 652). It would be safe 
 to ascribe a larger share in the collection of such materials 
 to the literary culture of the earlier reign of Nushirvan 
 in the sixth century. Like all other productions of that 
 period, they were undoubtedly in the Pehlevi tongue ; 
 but they must have been translated in great degree out 
 of the Bactrian and other old Persian dialects. Firdusi 
 may well have used some of these older sources in pre- 
 paring his versions in the Parsi, inasmuch as the poet's 
 home was in eastern Iran, and the literary and religious 
 treasures of that portion of the conquered country would 
 be most likely to have escaped the destructive fanaticism 
 of Islam. 
 
 It is recorded that Omar was at first inclined to spare the 
 heroic chronicles, whose religion was as free from idolatry 
 as that of the Koran. But his puritanism was so shocked 
 by the myth of the Simurgh and the white-haired child 
 nursed in her nest, and perhaps by the fire-cult of the 
 heroes, that he consigned the whole mass of national 
 legends to destruction, as dangerous to the true faith.^ 
 However this may be, it is certain that here, as in their 
 whole history, the Arab marauders were led by a purpose 
 higher than they knew, and that their desert creed was 
 warmed and expanded by the rich lore of Iran. They be- 
 came the apt pupils of this ripe culture. We find their 
 historians busy from the first in keeping alive the poetic 
 traditions of their subjects, while naturally doing their best 
 to suppress all remembrance of the glorious Achaemenidan 
 kings. They treated the old mythic wars of Iran and 
 Turan as genuine history, adding only the well-known 
 names and events of recent times. The rulers of eastern 
 
 * rt is believed that the denunciation of insane legends in the Koran (xxxi. 6) refers to 
 these myths. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 717 
 
 Iran were of Turkish, not Arab, origin.^ They sprang from 
 braziers and pewterers, slaves and robbers. They hated the 
 caHphate of Bagdad, and were spurred by jealousy of its 
 glory to an interest in literature as well as to the lust of 
 conquest. 
 
 The native religion and culture took refuge with those 
 warlike Sofifarides, Samanides, Ghaznevides, whose conver- 
 sion to Islam brought the ardor but not the intolerance of 
 the Arab. Three hundred years after the conquest, Jakub 
 Ben Leis, a Samanide, or perhaps a king half a century 
 later, has the Basitan-Nameh turned from Pehlevi into 
 Parsi, and sets his court-poet Dakiki to putting it into 
 rhyme ; but the poet dies and the work stops. Twenty 
 years later, at the end of the tenth Christian century, 
 the famous Mahmud of Ghazni resumes the undertak- 
 ing, and after immense labors in gathering the materials 
 places them in the hands of one to whose poetic genius, 
 by common consent, they of right belonged. The name 
 of this king of Oriental poets was Abul Kasim Mansur; 
 but he is known everywhere by the title given him by 
 Mahmud, which has never been disputed, — Firdusi, the 
 Singer of Paradise. 
 
 We must pause a moment to note the splendid vitality 
 of this Iranian imagination as shown in the history of the 
 Shah-Nameh. We see it bringing to its feet the Arab 
 conquerors, and making the very princes of hated Turan 
 its zealous students and apostles. We see it lifting on its 
 wings to the highest sphere of fame the devout worshipper 
 of a Semitic God. The exclusiveness of creed faded be- 
 fore its gospel of heroic humanity. The rude chiefs who 
 were struggling for the prize of the caliphate found them- 
 selves obliged to pay court to native genius, and appeal 
 to its resources against the foreign dynasty enthroned at 
 Bagdad in the name of Mahomet himself, their common 
 
 ^ Von Schack : Heldeitsagen d. Firdusi, i. 35. 
 
71 8 ISLAM. 
 
 lord. Every feature of this marvellous epic suggested 
 universality of thought and faith. 
 
 Firdusi was himself a devout Shiite, or follower of Ali, 
 holding firmly to the Persian side of the great schism which 
 divided Islam. Mahmud, on the other hand, was a Sun- 
 nite. This fact may in part explain the misunderstanding 
 which imbittered the poet's relations with his royal patron, 
 and brought the lord of many kingdoms to the loss of a 
 glory that was worth them all. In his whole record 
 Firdusi stands as the aesthetic ideal of the nation. In all 
 respects he is a genuine Persian. Possessed from child- 
 hood with the great idea which his life's work rounded 
 into full expression, he began collecting and versifying the 
 heroic traditions around him with the dawning of his poetic 
 sense. It is recorded of his boyhood, that the decayed 
 condition of a very ancient dike near his home in Kho- 
 rassan so moved his sorrow for the lot of his native prov- 
 ince that he formed the resolution to rebuild it as soon 
 as he could earn the means, and never forgot his vow. 
 By his thirty-sixth year his epic ideal, growing in secret, 
 like a young plant whose organs unfold one by one, had 
 taken distinct form. But though snatches of the work had 
 already attracted attention in Khorassan to what was going 
 on, it was not till considerably advanced in life that Fir- 
 dusi was called to take his due place among the lights of 
 the court of Mahmud, whose interest had been awakened 
 by the pathetic story of Rustem and Isfendiyar. His own 
 first love had been the tale of Feridun and Zohak, com- 
 pletest type of the epic warfare of good and evil ; and he 
 tells us that upon Mahmud's birthday he had a vision, in 
 which the whole world seemed in commotion, and a divine 
 voice promised that all sorrow should pass away before 
 this new Feridun, the delight of mankind. In a kind of 
 poetic tournament, Firdusi so commended himself above 
 all the court bards that it .became evident that the long- 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 719 
 
 desired epic-master had appeared. When the laureate 
 Ansarf, — who was wont, we are told, to have his favorite 
 verses copied in gold letters within arabesque borders, — 
 sitting among his companions in verse, beheld the country- 
 dress of the provincial rhymer, he is said to have cried out, 
 " Only poets, good brother, have admission to this society." 
 " I too am a poet," answered Firdusi, and entered at once 
 on an extempore contest, in which he amazed these literary 
 pontiffs by his familiarity with the national legend and his 
 brilliant improvisation.^ A beautiful residence in the royal 
 gardens, adorned with noble works of art, was placed at 
 his disposal, with all the literary treasures of the State, and 
 the poet's genius guarded against intrusion as a sacred 
 trust. As the work proceeded, portions were read to 
 Mahmud from time to time amidst festal dance and song. 
 The delighted monarch promised a piece of gold for every 
 distich, and would have paid it down as it became due, but 
 for Firdusi's preference to receive the whole at once at the 
 close of his work, and devote it to fulfilling the dream of 
 his youth. 
 
 But the king of bards was not exempt from the irony 
 which ever pursues ideal aims. Such exceptional honors 
 could not escape envy, and Mahmud seems to have been 
 open to intriguing tongues, like all of his class. We are 
 amazed, however, to hear that the poet was even permitted 
 to suffer for lack of food, as well as made to feel his de- 
 pendence by studied insults. Yet, strange to say, he seems 
 to have been recognized during all this time as the greatest 
 of poets, and the praises of the growing Shah-Nameh were 
 on every tongue. Even in the latest portion of his work, 
 that which celebrates the Sassanian line, he still sounds 
 the trumpet for his royal patron. If there was really any- 
 ground in his external relations for the sorrowful tone 
 which pervades his personal episodes, if the admired poet 
 
 ^ Von Hammer: Geschichte d- schon. Redek. Persiots, p 51. 
 
720 ISLAM. 
 
 was in fact poor and neglected, it may be that the fault lay- 
 in habits of his own, for Mahmud of Ghazni was certainly a 
 promoter of the arts. But a more probable key to the mys- 
 tery may be found in suspicions as to his orthodoxy. The 
 story, however, can hardly be credited, that he fell at Mah- 
 mud's feet and denied the faith which he strenuously asserted 
 in many passages of his poem. Even at the close of his life 
 he reaffirmed the creed of All in indignant terms, denoun- 
 cing as slanderers those who charged him with denying it. 
 It is certain that the king distrusted him, alleging that his 
 native Tus was noted for its scepticism.^ He who had 
 brought all the piety of Islam to bear tribute to the hated 
 fire-worshippers, and glorified the legends of unbelievers 
 with the glow of a monotheism believed to be sacred to 
 the Koran alone, who was awakening germs of compara- 
 tive religion in the quiet ferment of Iranian, Semitic, and 
 Tartar nationalities around him, may well have excited the 
 religious jealousy of a Mahometan prince. Nor would 
 it be strange if interested rivals should have produced a 
 gradual alienation from the genius which could evoke to 
 life all the national enthusiasm for a glorious past. 
 
 At all events, the life of the poet henceforth was a 
 tragedy. The death of an idolized son added grief to 
 disappointment. 
 
 "Beloved companion of my sorrowing years, 
 Why hast thou chosen another path than mine ? 
 Is it to greet new friends, thou leavest me ? 
 Wearied of h'fe in youth, thou yieldest me its woes. 
 Blood dims my eyes ; the world of light is his, 
 But there he will his father's place prepare. 
 Old age has come, no kindred soul remains ; 
 Yet am I seen by one who for my coming yearns. 
 Alas ! that he has passed, so young, without one brief farewell ! " 
 
 The discouragements of his position, and a keen sense 
 of solitude and of the lapse of life, explain the frequent 
 
 ' Von Hammer, p. 52. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 721 
 
 plaintive ejaculations and meditations which interrupt the 
 heroic current of his song. He constantly recurs to the 
 uncertainty of all tenures and the need of complete sub- 
 mission to the will of God. Thus in the poem of " Kai 
 Khosru's Return," he suddenly breaks forth : — 
 
 " I am poor, forsaken wholly, and my love of song is spent. 
 The roar of beast and lay of bird are both alike to me. 
 The cup of threescore years is drained ; my thoughts are of the bier. 
 Ah ! that the rose's perfume dies! Alas, the Persian word 
 Cuts like a sword ! May it yet leave me time 
 To tell one Saga more from the glorious days of old, 
 To bear my name down when my life is done. 
 Then shall He save me there above, the Lord of sword and tongue." 
 
 At last the great task is done, and the bolt falls, striking 
 the toiler to the earth. Mahmud, alienated by intriguing 
 courtiers, proves a niggard, and pays but a fraction of the 
 promised reward. The outraged poet flings it away for a 
 glass, burns his latest verses, puts on a dervish's robe, 
 shakes the dust of Ghazni from his feet, and departs, 
 leaving the bitter satire which cuts off the monarch's share 
 in an inheritance mightier far than the gold-heaps that 
 poured from the broken idol of Somnauth. " If I plunged 
 into the sea of Mahmud's court and found no pearls, 
 'twas the fault of my star; how could the sea be blamed? 
 But my book was not writ for Mahmud, 't is for All and 
 the Prophet." Say rather for humanity, for immortality, 
 O Poet ! Well may the epos of honor, heroism, and love, 
 the high tragedy of Nemesis, dispense with the coffer of 
 a Ghaznevide king. The sense of royal ingratitude was 
 not aggravated by experience of public neglect. As he 
 wandered, like Dante, from court to court, pursued by 
 vindictive demands for his person, he found everywhere 
 sympathy and honor. Better still was the assurance of 
 immortal fame. " I have filled the world with my praise ; 
 and when my breath departs, I shall not die." 
 
 46 
 
722 ISLAM. 
 
 But the wound was mortal. Returning at last to his 
 early home, the old man heard a child repeat a line of his 
 satire, and the distress it produced in his mind ended only 
 in death. The legend says that the prince of Tus, proba- 
 bly through fear of Mahmiid, refused to bury the heretic 
 with religious honors; but being warned in a dream, in 
 which he saw Firdust crowned in Paradise, he repented 
 and paid the tribute due.^ 
 
 We can hardly do justice to the self-respect of genius, 
 or to the less honorable rage of offended pride, without 
 quoting from the indignant response that thundered against 
 the insults of an ignoble king. Firdusi ascribes the con- 
 duct of Mahmud to his willingness to lend his ear to 
 malignant slanders, when he should have considered the 
 debt which the poet's great work would lay upon mankind. 
 A Mahmud may despise it, but let him understand that 
 this is to defy the bolts of heaven : — 
 
 " While the world endures, the wise shall love this song, 
 For all the mighty dead have heard its call to life ; 
 Nor other claim, O King, could save thy name from death. 
 Long as the world endures, this shrine shall ne'er decay. 
 Long have I labored, poor and ill-esteemed, 
 And thou hast rudely broken faith with me at last. 
 I made the earth a paradise, and Persia lives again. 
 Hadst thou not had a miser's heart, my head were crowned with gold. 
 Had Mahmud been a prince, my seat were at his side. 
 O rarely generous king, whose boon 's a glass of beer ! 
 Shall a slave's son learn royalty? In Eden plant 
 A bitter root, and though the sweetest streams it drink, 
 Yet shall the bitterness infect its fruit for aye. 
 And thou, the charcoal-maker's son, art still black as thy coal. 
 When I before the great Judge stand, dust on my head, I '11 pray, 
 O Lord, burn thou his soul in flames, but robe my soul in light ! " 
 
 Surely the poet had a streak of the savage in him ; and the 
 conscious dignity of his claim finds poor ending in this 
 
 1 Mohl : Shah-Nameh, i. xHv. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 723 
 
 revengeful mood. Or shall we find in his wrongs such 
 justification of its scorn as the world has accorded to Dante 
 for similar sentence on his foes? 
 
 It was his fate to die in the full sense of these wrongs. 
 For when Mahmud at last came to recognize them, and 
 sent full payment with robes of honor to the sad old 
 sufferer in his native town, the messengers are said to 
 have met his funeral train passing from its gates. His 
 daughter, stung like himself by years of* injustice, proudly 
 refused to receive the gift; but a sister, remembering the 
 longings of his childhood, asked that it be expended in 
 accomplishing the object to which he would have devoted 
 it, had it been duly paid. So the ancient dike was re- 
 stored with the price of his 'great sacrifice, and a caravan- 
 sary erected in his name. But a grander bulwark and a 
 sweeter hospice stand forever, of his spiritual building, 
 for the heart of man. 
 
 The chronicler of heroes shared the destiny of his great 
 Iranians, — a life-long struggle for ideal achievement, suc- 
 cessful therein beyond all dream, but smitten by Ahriman's 
 fiercest blows ; a victory won, like Rustem's over Isfendiyar, 
 under terrible conditions ; the destiny of Good to be first 
 the victim of Evil, and to rise to euthanasy through tears 
 and blood. 
 
 His persecution served one good purpose which should 
 not be overlooked. It proves him to have been sur- 
 rounded by powerful enemies, who would have sharply 
 criticised every aberration from the traditions of Iran. 
 That no such criticism has appeared, fully sustains his 
 claim of entire fidelity to them. The Mussulman histo- 
 rian, writing a century after his death, and claiming to 
 have consulted an immense list of authorities, recognizes 
 Firdusi as his best and fullest source.^ And so it has been 
 
 1 Modjmel-al-Tettjarikh, Mohl : Shah-Nameh, i. xlvii. Firdusi's poem was written 
 before the middle of the eleventh century (1020 a. d.). A century earlier, Tabari had written 
 
724 ISLAM. 
 
 ever since. None disputes his claim. His triumph has 
 made good his prophecy, and it hes in the higher planes 
 of thought. The romancers of later times, whose stu- 
 pendous supernatural fictions turn the charge into a com- 
 pliment, pronounce his simplicity tame, finding truth not 
 in the imagination, but in unbridled fancy, but none the 
 less confessing his greatness by imitating him when they 
 have need. These romancers, beginning with Nizami, open 
 a new school of poetry, which wholly sacrifices historical or 
 traditional connection to dramatic interest, and paints with 
 the gorgeous colors that have given currency to the telling 
 word persiflage, which no one would apply to Firdusi's 
 simple and earnest speech. Still later, Semitic influences 
 cover the great personalities of the epic with Biblical asso- 
 ciations, genealogical and other, absurdly incongruous 
 with their strictly Aryan character. 
 
 An epic is no mere compilation of narratives, woven 
 into connected and poetic form. It is in literature the 
 complete ideal of a nation, an epoch, a civilization; and 
 its full literary personality, and every characteristic trait 
 and tradition of the period and the people find in such a 
 supreme resultant their natural place and meaning. Of 
 those who regard the Iliad as one connected work, some 
 suppose its central motive to be the personal relation of 
 Achilles to the Greek chiefs ; others find its pivotal point 
 in the siege of Troy. But the epic significance of the Iliad 
 turns on no personal life or historical event. That which 
 brought the rhapsodies together, and made them for cen- 
 turies the inspiration of the Greek mind, and through this 
 endowed the human race to endless time, was their com- 
 mon fitness to embody the Greek ideal, the type of civili- 
 
 from the archives of Persia the most careful of histories of Islam, extending like the my- 
 thology of the Shah-Nameh fi-om the earliest to the latest times ; but he was equally indefinite 
 in making known his authorities with the great epic poet of traditional lore. Tabari drew 
 from the same sources. Masudi's Meadows of Gold was another historical work of great 
 value, which just preceded Firdusi (943 a.d.). 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. \\ /V 7^5 
 
 zation which imprinted itself on every Greek natOTferr'All 
 the semi-historical or mythic personages which the national 
 genius had created in the image of its own motive forces, 
 and gradually made into real powers, flowed naturally to 
 the hand of the poet, who was himself the fullest expres- 
 sion of that genius, and could bring out their ideal rela- 
 tions on a scale of national experience broad enough to 
 give them room. Thus Achilles' wrath, Ulysses' wander- 
 ings, or the Siege of Troy, was but the setting for a crowded 
 picture in which every form was equally a living force of 
 Greek instinct. Hence the dramatic interest of the epos, 
 the variety, sharpness, and consistency of its characters, 
 which are nothing less than products of the continued play 
 of typical ideas and qualities brought to their ideal form, 
 their natural relations to each other and the whole Greek 
 consciousness of existence, by the master genius of the 
 race. The elaboration of these personal types by the ideal 
 life of one race has lifted them into universal relations, the 
 true sphere of the ideal, and made them immortal com- 
 panions of man in the ages. Nor is the religious element 
 in the old Greek nature less distinct in Homer than is the 
 dramatic. For the epos is, as its name imports, the 
 "word" of a civilization, — its full ideal speech, in which 
 no genuine form of its genius can fail to find voice. 
 
 This representative fulness renders it possible to find, 
 as the master-key of every epos, the dominant conscious- 
 ness, or motive principle, of the civilization which produced 
 it. It is of this supreme element that the epos is the con- 
 summate flower. This assures it a universal function, since 
 only a profound human interest, a structural law of being, 
 could control the special development of any race or 
 epoch. In the Homeric epic this all-resolving idea is free 
 individuality, — the buoyant play of intense will and pas- 
 sionate instinct under conditions of a divine Nemesis, 
 representing, however, a national or public rather than a 
 
726 ISLAM, 
 
 personal authority, and less in the interest of morality than 
 of loyalty to the Greek ideal of heroism. And this key to 
 Homer is the key to the whole history of Greek civiliza- 
 tion. Again, the master-motive of the " Divina Commedia " 
 was that of medieval Christianity, the idea of a world- 
 judgment on the virtues and sins of men, conceived after 
 the developed theology of ten centuries of Christian teach- 
 ing, — an apotheosis of those heavens and hells which 
 formed a constant Presence of overwhelming terrors and 
 all-inspiring hopes. It is easy to imagine why this judg- 
 ment-day of the ages, lifted to the throne of an epos, 
 should have gathered every great personality, good or 
 evil, past or present, into its tremendous symbolic circles. 
 It was the culmination of a religion which had been the 
 soul and the school of thirty generations. Here the free 
 individuality of Homer is supplanted by a terrific ma- 
 chinery which grinds every living being into food for 
 Almighty Wrath or Almighty Good-Will, — a Nemesis, 
 representative not of the moral but of the theological law, 
 and working in human bodies and souls, not according to 
 their inherent relations, but as an autocratic external police 
 for the future life. It is the triumph of prescription, of 
 irresponsible despotism over the insignificance of human 
 endeavor, and moreover charged to the full with those 
 mad rivalries, jealousies, and hates which constituted the 
 life of the Italian republics in Dante's day. Over it soar 
 indeed the poet's moods of infinite tenderness for all that 
 he loved and adored; but the wondrously human loves 
 and hates are alike steeped in the fearful autocracy of 
 a semi-barbarous religion. The soul is not here a hero, as 
 in Homer, but even in its virtues and its joys the veriest 
 slave. 
 
 The Shah-Nameh turns on a higher motive than does 
 either the Divina Commedia or the Iliad. It is more pro- 
 foundly moral than the Greek epic, and more freely human 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. ^2'J 
 
 than the Italian. It represents the tragedy of human des- 
 tiny and the irony that makes so large an element therein, 
 in so far as these arise from the conflict of good and evil. 
 And this conflict is conceived in a far deeper and more 
 personal sense than as the war of Iran with Turan. The 
 national element, still more the ethnological, is secondary, 
 and enters into most of the narrative only in a remote and 
 insignificant way. But through the whole and every part, 
 — through the vicissitudes ot Feridun's career ; the martyr- 
 dom of Iraj and of Siavaksh ; the heroic woes of Rustem ; 
 the contrasted qualities of such feminine ideals as Sudabe, 
 Rudabe, Menishe, and Tahmine ; the shame of Sam for 
 his half-heathen child and the love of the giant bird who 
 supplies the lack of parental care ; the love-adventures of 
 the heroes ; the bitter evils of circumstances woven out 
 of blind hopes and malicious plots ; the grievous fortunes of 
 noble men in false positions, like Piran ; the untimely blights 
 that fall from royal selfishness, like that of Gushtasp, upon 
 loyal and noble hearts ; the passionate or subdued laments 
 that close the sweetest human experiences, one after an- 
 other, with confessions of the impermanence of earthly 
 hopes and joys, yet ever with the grand comfort of simple 
 trust in righteousness of the heroic stamp, — through all 
 this infinite play of human feeling, whereof the wars with 
 Turk and Div are but incidents, flows the strain of divine 
 necessity that the good shall suffer for the evil ; the stress 
 of limitations and compulsions, which no precautions can 
 fend off and no virtue escape, and only heroic will and 
 pure reconciliation to infinite forces can meet and con- 
 quer. And when we add the gathered stores of moral 
 and political philosophy which the Shah-Nameh has 
 heaped around the later kings in place of a legendary lore 
 more suited to remoter times, we may venture to say 
 that no grand principle of self-culture, Stoic or Christian, 
 Aryan or Semitic, old or new, is wanting to this Bible of 
 
728 ISLAM. 
 
 the heroic Will, this sublime Valhalla of ideal lives. Never 
 for one moment is there a failure of the grand motive, the 
 serious tenor, the solemn consciousness of life's summons 
 to self-sacrifice and moral loyalty. So through every 
 phase of triumph and defeat, of cruel circumstance and 
 irreparable harm, of tenderness and anguish, we hear the 
 steady peal of retributory laws, so vast in their reach of 
 ideal relation that their every stroke seems to tell upon 
 the whole world, as belonging to them and to them only, 
 — as if for all mankind there could be ho other liberty 
 than to obey and trust the law of duty, no other school 
 for heroes, no other mastery of fate. 
 
 Nothing is more universal in scope, yet nothing so con- 
 centrated, as the personal life. What the inherited woes of 
 Cecrops' line are made to teach so impressively in Greek 
 tragedy is less clear or just as an expression of ethical 
 inviolability than the working of evil thought and conduct 
 within the criminal's soul, bearing fruit after its kind, and 
 upon the innocent circle nearest his life. And this is the 
 characteristic teaching of the Shih-Nameh. The martyr- 
 dom of love and faith forever involved in evil-doing is here 
 brought into closest relation with its producing cause; 
 and the effect is heightened by the fearless realism Avhich 
 will not blink the sternest facts of experience. In these 
 heroic ethics the compensatory happiness so commonly 
 made the motive of virtue, the final arrangement of poetic 
 justice held so essential to the modern novel or play, con- 
 structejd to please an audience at the cost of tragic power, 
 have no place. The stern problems are left, as life is 
 wont to .leave them, unsolved, save by faith in unseen 
 values, and the unpledged reserv^es of help in the spiritual 
 nature. The law of sacrifice is absolute, and its tragedy 
 complete, because the full meaning of the struggle with 
 Ahriman is accepted, while the resolution of evil into good 
 is referred to the forces of character only. Upon a plane 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 729 
 
 higher than that of outward circumstance of any kind, the 
 passion and despair which have found free utterance must 
 be healed. Such is the uninterrupted movement of this 
 infinitely varied oratorio of moral conflict, in which hero- 
 ism and religion are one. 
 
 So sincere is its realism, that the frequent appeals of the 
 poet to his readers to remember the vanity of all earthly 
 hopes and to grieve over the fickleness of fortune, the 
 admonitions in which his sorrowful legends end, — to seek 
 consolation in God and a life to come, — although in strong 
 contrast with the brave silence of the heroes themselves on 
 these matters of sentiment and faith, do not fall upon us 
 as mere didactic commonplaces. They seem only natural 
 expressions of sympathy, like those of the chorus in the 
 old Greek tragedies. This plaintive Jeremiah at least 
 knows how to respect the robust manliness of his mar- 
 tyrs, and to make their very woes teach disinterested 
 loyalty to the noble and the right. 
 
 The heroes of the Shah-Nameh are thoroughly human ; 
 they give way to natural emotions, to pride, to anger, to 
 despair, — sometimes to less pardonable passions. They 
 are generally colossal champions of the flesh, as well as 
 unconscious servants of the spirit, or Titanic powers of 
 noble will. They represent the crude social conditions 
 out of which their semi-mythic forms were evolved. All 
 the more shall we admire the glow of moral grandeur that 
 is kindled within them ; for all that has been said of the 
 substance of this epic can be fully justified, and its culmi- 
 nation in such ideals as Siavaksh and Iraj lift us to those 
 spiritual levels to which all ages aspire. 
 
 Since a scope so grandly human must cover all human 
 history, the Shah-Nimeh opens with the earliest mythic 
 rulers of mankind. It must show even in them the con- 
 flict with evil in nature and with blindness and brutality in 
 man. In the Avesta there were cosmic forces, elementary 
 
730 ISLAM. 
 
 processes of creation. But the heroic legend wants them 
 as human will, even in those earlier stages when man is 
 scarcely above the level of the lower creation. Gayomard 
 is here a king, happy but for Ahriman, whose son slays 
 the prince Siamek, but is slain in return by the latter's 
 son Husheng. The avenger has. nature on his side ; 
 her tigers, wolves, and birds unite with men and peris 
 to punish the common foe. Following up his mission of 
 destroying evil, Husheng aims a stone at a snake, which 
 strikes another stone instead, and fire is struck forth. The 
 Iranian flame-god here springs, as fire does in the Veda 
 from bits of wood, out of the rock hurled against an evil 
 power. Firdusi sees a mystic connection here. " As the 
 Arabs turned towards a stone in prayer, so our fathers 
 turned to the fire." ^ Really, the substance of both beliefs 
 is the same, — that a higher life than the crude elements 
 resides in Nature and awaits the first bold contact of hu- 
 man motive and will. The next king, Tahmurath, evidently 
 represents the stage of growing self-confidence, in which 
 man begins to be a power over evil. He not only instructs 
 men in weaving, and in taming wild beasts, but is specially 
 gifted in controlling demons, and triumphantly rides Ahri- 
 man himself, in shape of a horse, around the world. He 
 forces their secrets from them by stronger force of will, 
 and fails only when he doubts his own power. Firdusfs 
 moral is ready: "O Heaven ! thou liftest a man above the 
 sky, only to cast him dov/n at once under the earth ! " 
 But only by such strenuous effort against evil " did man 
 learn wisdom and that greatest of arts, — to write." 
 
 For now Society is born ; and Jemshid is its maker, 
 ruler of the world by noble will. With Jemshid enters a 
 more distinctly moral force, though gdod and evil are not 
 without moral significance in the lives of those earlier 
 
 * The black stone which the Arabs kissed in the Kaaba, and faced in prayer, was supposed 
 to have been originally an angel. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 73 1 
 
 kings. For mythology is truer to human nature than that 
 form of the evolutionary theory which conceives the moral 
 sense to have had a definite beginning in man after purely 
 animal and selfish instincts had already become developed. 
 Ideas of eood and evil never could have been formed 
 without some relation to the sense of right and wrong. 
 Jemshid indicates an advanced stage of this sense. He 
 honors all men according to what they have achieved. 
 Of the first three classes into which he divides mankind, 
 even the laborer is no pariah, but a self-respecting worker. 
 " He does not obey any one slavishly ; is a free cultivator 
 of the earth without strife. The wise have said, * 'T is idle- 
 ness enslaves those that should be free.' " Only the fourth 
 class are here depreciated, "those who seek profit by trade, 
 with arrogant thirst for gain," — in other words, distribu- 
 tors, or middle-men, as distinguished from producers; a 
 class whose uses for civilized society had not yet been 
 recognized, though it was even then clear to the poet that 
 " their penalty was to be always in care." 
 
 As a social organizer, Jemshid teaches subordination and 
 due regard for position and powers. He, too, makes the 
 Divs do his bidding, helping build houses for the suffering 
 classes, teaching medicine and the healing of wounds. He 
 also paid the just price for victories. " Never lived an 
 investigator like Jemshid ; he sailed over seas, and nothing 
 was hid from his sight." But this Iranian Solomon must 
 discover also that will-power has its evil side. In his pride 
 he conceives himself to be omniscient, because under his 
 reign of three hundred years death was not, and the Divs 
 did his bidding in bonds. "So everything fell away;" 
 and the anti-Jemshid appears in Zohak. The biter, the 
 serpent, the old Vedic cloud-god whom the lightning of 
 Indra slays, is here wickedness incarnated as king. Zohak, 
 according to the epic, has not this function by inheritance, 
 but by his own will. His father is " a good sheikh of the 
 
732 ISLAM, 
 
 desert, humbling himself before God, possessing herds and 
 horses like the Persians." But the son was " bold and 
 careless, proud of his hosts of gold-bridled Arab horses," 
 and easily yielded to the tempter's " promise of knowledge 
 for selfish ends." Firdusi calls the tempter Iblis, who is 
 the Mahometan Ahriman ; and the whole story has a dis- 
 tinctly Semitic coloring. The Persian legend evidently 
 associated Zohak with some Arabic or Assyrian dynasty 
 of invaders. He begins by slaying his own father; and 
 his passion for flesh causes serpents, the " kiss of Iblis," to 
 spring from his shoulders, craving constant supplies of 
 human brain for food. Social order, the bonds of Jem- 
 shid, is overturned ; and Iran, rent with civil strife, passes 
 over to the destroyer, Jemshid dies, weary of this fleeting 
 world. But Zohak's fate is worse. Utter horror of him- 
 self, which no devices can remove, compels him to gratify 
 the twofold demon with two chosen human victims a 
 day, one of whom is saved by good men and sent into 
 the wilderness, where these scapegoats of Iran become the 
 Kurdish tribes, — nomads, and knowing not God. But now 
 the terrible dreams of Zohak are interpreted by his di- 
 viners as foreshowing the birth of Feridun the avenger, 
 whose head shall touch the sky, and whose brazen club 
 shall strike down the tyrant in the name of his murdered 
 father, and of the beautiful cow his nurse, another victim, 
 — everything belonging to Feridun being sacred, and the 
 legend mixing up curiously Iranian and Semitic symbols. 
 Zohak vainly gropes through the land for the predestined 
 child ; but, after the type of all Oriental messiahs, he is 
 borne away by his mother into India for safety, and there, 
 in due time, learns his origin and function. 
 
 What Destiny has decreed cannot be stayed. The plot 
 of Feridun's brothers against his life fails, and he returns 
 terrible to purify and deliver; captures the city of the 
 wicked king, casts his godless talisman into the dust, slays 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 733 
 
 his magicians, and sits on the throne of Jemshid the 
 Good. The tyrant's wives rehearse the tale of his crimes, 
 wanderings, and frightful pains ; the people declare for 
 Feridun, who gains a great battle, then binds the demon 
 in Demavend, and nails him to the rock. Strange trans- 
 formation of the old legend ! The punishment of the hero 
 for bringing the fire of civilization to men against the will 
 of Jove has here become a similar punishment of the spirit 
 of evil for depriving men of the blessings of that fire. It 
 is the difi"erence bet\veen the Persian and the Greek. In 
 the Zohak myth, the punishment is in the interest of the 
 moral law : in the Promethean, it is quite otherwise. 
 
 " Alas, let us not sin ; since neither good nor evil things abide. 
 It is best to leave good deeds for our monument in men's memories. 
 Feridun was not made of musk and amber ; he won his glory by jus- 
 tice and love. Be just and generous, and thou shalt be a Feridun, 
 whose glory is to have delivered the world from the hands of the 
 wicked." 
 
 A great and happy king, " who bound evil by good, 
 whenever he saw a wrong or a desert place," Feridun 
 at last wishes for repose in old age, and divides his em- 
 pire equally among his three sons ; the youngest and best 
 of whom has the ancient homestead of his race, Iran. 
 Selm and Tur, enraged at the distribution, conspire to 
 dethrone Iraj and seize his patrimony. In reply to their 
 arrogant demands, Feridun warns them sorrowfully that 
 they will reap as they have sown, and then tenderly com- 
 mends Iraj to the protection due to his innocence and his 
 right. Iraj, inspired by the purest self-denial, resolves to 
 rise to a still higher plane, and trust wholly to the guid- 
 ance of his brotherly instincts in face of almost certain 
 death. 
 
 " Who, when he thinks on death, so sure to all, 
 Would plant the tree of hate, with roots in blood, 
 To bear the fruit of ven2:eance ? Never dwelt 
 
734 ISLAM. 
 
 Hate in the kings of old. I will go forth 
 Unarmed, and yield my throne to them. 
 My brethren; asking but this recompense. 
 That I shall turn their cruel hearts to love." 
 
 Against his own good sense the old king grants consent, 
 and sends a letter of fatherly counsel by the heroic martyr. 
 And Iraj goes sweetly to his brothers, saying, — 
 
 " Will you but cease from hate, the whole is yours ; 
 Let it go freely, if it bars your hearts 
 From the dear love I dearer hold than power." 
 
 But when they see how gladly all the army look on the 
 fair boy and his noble ways, then the devil in them rages, 
 and they kill him and send his head to his father. " O 
 Earth ! why didst thou not save him whom thou hadst 
 nursed on thy bosom? And thou, O Man, who cherishest 
 evil thought in thy heart, behold here the fruit it bears ! " 
 Then the old king Feridun, looking out anxiously over the 
 desert, beholds the caravan bringing its fatal message and 
 freight, and breaks into loud lament over the pride of his 
 heart, forever lost: — 
 
 " O trust not in earthly love ! O thou just God, 
 Send thou the avenger from this sufferer's blood ! 
 Then will I gladly greet the house of death." 
 
 And in due time comes the hero Manoshcihr, issue of this 
 woe, heir to this demand for Nemesis. A new Jemshid 
 rises from the grave, and the war of God against Ahriman 
 bursts upon the heads of Selm and Tur. The criminals 
 are beheaded, but the young prince, better than his age, 
 does not send their heads to their woful father. His cry 
 to the fleeing Selm is the voice of the eternal law : — 
 
 "The tree of thine own planting shakes its fruit 
 Into thy bosom. Is 't a thorn, thou sowed'st it, 
 Or robe of silk, the weaver was thyself." 
 
 The armies of the culprits are sent home forgiven, crying, — 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 735 
 
 " O Pehlevans ! crowned with victory, the earth 
 No more shall reek with blood ; the star of tyrants fades." 
 
 Feridun receives his grandson with thanksgiving " to 
 the Power that renders to each his due, with guardian 
 care." But the world is narrow now, and he longs for 
 freer air. Failing under the burden of this tragedy, which 
 covers all the sympathies of his being, he fades away from 
 life, sorrowing till its span is past. 
 
 " So long ago he died, but left a glorious name, 
 Because he learned from suffering to be wise." 
 
 Such are the opening scenes of an epic whose movement 
 embraces all history, and in which every shock of individ- 
 ual destiny seems to involve the whole frame of existence. 
 In these scenes we have the key-note to the whole, — the 
 dealing of the moral law with personal character, and the 
 solution of all the mysteries of the life-struggle by loyalty 
 to faith, manliness, love. The hero's sword was here, as it 
 still is, the terrible minister of moral necessities deeper than 
 human will; but love and forgiveness were the highest per- 
 sonal ideal, and it was their martyrdom that he came in to 
 avenge. Equally marked in the very outset is the dis- 
 tinctively natural and human character of the Persian epic. 
 It does not rest, like the Mahibharata or Ramayana, on su- 
 pernatural interests and aids, aggrandized at man's expense, 
 but is penetrated by the profound sense of human experi- 
 ence, of struggle with circumstances, of the nets of sin and 
 sorrow, of the grandeur of personal Will, the power of man 
 to achieve, even in submitting to the inexorable limits of 
 his existence. In the tale of Feridiin and his sons the hu- 
 man motive excludes all others. In other tales, the super- 
 natural, sometimes prominent, is always secondary, and does 
 not disturb the constant emphasis on the moral law. 
 
 It is in accordance with this motive that the interest is 
 wont to gather about the closest natural relationship, the 
 
73^ ISLAM. 
 
 sympathies and obligations that consecrate domestic ties, 
 the fiHal, fraternal, sexual sanctities. These are the centres 
 of personality. At these roots of character the forces of 
 evil strike most fiercely. In these the blindness of passion, 
 the agony of pain and loss, the coils of misleading destiny, 
 are most destructive. In these are the situations which 
 have always been found most full of tragic motive. In 
 these relations, which Nature brings but once, and whose 
 destruction by folly or crime or fate can never be repaired, 
 poetry has found its supreme types of suffering and de- 
 votion. All races and faiths gather about this common 
 hearth, and find in the power of courage and sacrifice to 
 master or transform the bitter wounds of filial, fraternal, 
 and conjugal ties, the height of heroic victory. The law 
 of early races, that the nearest blood-relative should under- 
 take the duty of avenging unnatural crimes, has wide scope 
 in ancient mythology. In family crimes Greek tragedy 
 centred. " The woes of Pelops' line," the dreadful fate 
 that drives Orestes and his sister to follow up domestic 
 crimes by bloody penalties involving agonies of atonement, 
 have made them immortal types of an heroic virtue pur- 
 chased at immeasurable cost. The Trojan War is the con- 
 sequence of a broken marriage tie. Conflict between father 
 and son, brought on by some fatal mistake, and ending 
 either in the death of one at the other's hand, or in the 
 infliction of irreparable injury before the dreadful illusion 
 is broken, which comes to its supreme type in the Persian 
 tale of Rustem and Sohrab, is found at the heart of all great 
 mythologies. Baldur is unintentionally slain by his brother 
 Hodur, whom the evil spirit Loki misleads. The duels of 
 Lancelot and his son Sir Galahad, and that of the brothers 
 Balin and Balan,all noble knights of pure and tender heart, 
 are the most touching episodes of the old British epic. 
 The successions of night and day, the following of dawn 
 by noon, of twilight by night, interpreted as the strife of 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 737 
 
 parent and offspring, are the key to a large proportion of 
 the Greek myths ; and the successive dynasties of the gods 
 in Hesiod are dethronements of a similar nature. The 
 supreme forms of atonement in all religions which rest on 
 anthropomorphic ideas are sacrifices of children by their 
 parents. They proceed not from cruelty so much as from 
 the conviction that no other atonement can so thoroughly 
 express the agony, and so the efficacy, of self-sacrifice as 
 this. We read the terrible commandment of the god to 
 Agamemnon to purchase the safety of the Greeks before 
 Troy by slaying his daughter Iphigenia on the altar; the 
 test of absolute obedience laid on Abraham and Jephthah 
 by their religion; and, what is entirely similar in its origin, 
 the Christian mystery of the Atonement, by which the ab- 
 stractions of the Trinity become clothed to the popular 
 imagination in all the fervent colors of human martyrdom 
 both for the Father and the Son. No religion, however su- 
 pernatural in its pretensions, however illusory in its dogmas, 
 dispenses with resting its ideal ultimately on the natural 
 relations of man as supreme ; in other words, on the divine 
 significance of the family, not only as the beginning of 
 social progress, but as the undying principle of social ex- 
 istence and the germinal point of personal character. So 
 soon, therefore, as the will began to get free expression, so 
 as to form its own epos, we find that its ideal types of the 
 tragedy of life, of the irony of fortune, and the struggle 
 of human limitations with the mysteries of pain and death 
 have been sought, not in the overwhelming interference of 
 gods, nor in miraculous immunities from finite conditions, 
 but in the intensest play of those relations which are near- 
 est and dearest, most thoroughly human and universal. 
 Of the high possibilities of these relations for tragic situa- 
 tion, for heroic culture, for the march of Nemesis, the 
 Shah-Nameh has much to teach. 
 
 This was to be expected from the emphasis of the Iranian 
 
 47 
 
738 ISLAM. 
 
 mind on the ideal dualism of existence, the moral and 
 physical antagonisms which reveal it. The Shah-Nameh 
 is probably the most remarkable instance of this tragic 
 emphasis among the great products of the religious im- 
 agination. All other cycles of legend which partake of the 
 same spirit are so infinitely complex and discursive, that 
 the strength of this mighty motive seems dissipated in a 
 crowd of details. Scandinavian, British, Hindu, and Chris- 
 tian mythologies interweave such a medley of subordinate 
 interests with every expression of it, that we lose the sense 
 of its sovereignty. It does not stand forth as the very at- 
 mosphere of feeling, or the magnetic force that groups the 
 infinite variety of circumstance around its poles, revealing 
 the limits of passion and power, and the sway of cosmical 
 as well as humanly universal law. In this instinct for 
 human limit, this possession by their own central motive, 
 only the Greek poets have surpassed Firdusi ; and they 
 have not taken this special motive as central, upon so vast 
 and difficult a scale. So skilfully does he manage the im- 
 mense mass of materials, that everything helps to empha- 
 size the personal glory or grief, to accent the tread of 
 Destiny over man's strength and his weakness alike, as it 
 beats up the latent forces of sacrifice and ideal aim from 
 the dreadful soil of anguish and death. No dejis ex 
 macliina finds place here, as the Euripidean god enters 
 the dreadful coil of fate around Orestes and Electra, to 
 settle all difficulties for the writer, and solve things insolu- 
 ble, by mere fiat. The mercurial Greek's fancy might be 
 satisfied with this ; the serious Perso-Mahometan's, never. 
 Heroism is here the substance of religion, and stands on 
 its own merit. It is itself the ideal, and no god can for 
 one moment dispense with its conditions. It lifts the poet 
 above the bounds of nationality, masters every race preju- 
 dice on which the legend might at first seem founded. It 
 recognizes itself in the Turanian hero as well as in the 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 739 
 
 Iranian ; in Piran, Afrasiyab, Pilsam. And many Turanian 
 women, who win the love of tlie Pelilevans and bear the 
 noblest persons in the epos, become more admirable to us, 
 and awaken deeper sympathy than do the Iranians them- 
 selves. The same moral standard suffices for believer and 
 unbeliever. Except in certain passages of the later por- 
 tion, in which the hand of the Zoroastrian priesthood is 
 apparent, the narrowness of the Avestan stand-point is 
 escaped. The epos honors only Nature and truth. 
 
 The line of the great Pehlevans of Seistan, motherland 
 of Iranian liberties, begins in Sam ^ and ends in the Per- 
 sian Achilles, Rustem. Let us see how the legend evolves 
 this colossal type of heroism. 
 
 To Sam a son is born, with every mark of the true 
 Pehlevan, save that his hair is white. This trait would 
 seem, like the similar legend of the Chinese Lao-tse, to in- 
 timate a higher wisdom, not derived from the experience of 
 age, and to foreshadow the idea of intuition, — something 
 which the wise in their own generation could not conceive 
 as belonging to a child, but destined to put their finalities 
 to shame. Such is certainly the point of the Persian 
 legend of Zal. In the terror and shame of having brought 
 some demonic power into the world, Sam becomes self- 
 ish enough to expose his child on the top of Alborz ; more 
 cruel than the lioness, who cares for her whelps, " giving 
 them her blood to drink, not for any reward, but because 
 she cannot live without them." And indeed, when his 
 father forsakes him, Zal is taken up by the mighty life of 
 Nature, as the hero is in all religious mythology. The 
 infant's cry, in hunger and heat, brings the giant bird, the 
 Simurgh, on mighty wings, to his relief; and her pity is 
 approved by the voice from heaven foretelling his great 
 destiny. So the young birds are his brothers, and he has 
 
 ^ Identified by Spiegel (Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. Morgeiil. Geselhch., iii. 251) with 
 Kerega^pa, of the Aryan myth. 
 
^40 ISLAM. 
 
 the largest share in their parent's love, — a love and ad- 
 miration bred in the monsters of the wild when refused 
 by human kin. 
 
 Sam, meanwhile, slowly awakes to the sense of his folly 
 and sin. Impressed by a dream in which his own whiten- 
 ing locks instruct him that his child's hair was not the 
 work of demons, but of God, he sets forth to find his son. 
 As his train labors up the heights of Alborz, the mighty 
 bird comes soaring from her nest on the summit, a majes- 
 tic pile of sandal-wood and ivory and woven aloe-branches. 
 In answer to the father's prayer, the Simurgh brings Zal 
 upon her bosom, — a noble youth, innocent of all craft, 
 wise only in Nature's lore, which, like his symbolic hair, 
 supplies that which lengthened years alone are supposed 
 to bring ; and his father receives him joyfully, while the 
 Simurgh's parting gift is a feather from her own wing, 
 which he was to burn whenever he should need her aid 
 in the command of occult powers. 
 
 Next comes a new antagonism of wills, out of which 
 the future shall be born. Zal's romantic love for Rudabe, 
 daughter of the unbelieving king of Cabulistan, replete 
 with stolen interviews and vows of devotion, results in a 
 letter written to his father in praise of the maiden, which 
 puts the old Pehlevan to a severer trial than the child's 
 hoary head. What penalty must follow such mingling of 
 the blood of Feridun with that of Zohak, such union of 
 the true believer with the worshipper of Divs ! But the 
 Mobads, who seem bound, at least in the heroic legend, to 
 play the part of liberalism, predict that the child of this 
 marriage shall win the world for Iran, bring comfort to the 
 whole land, and conquer all the strife and pain of Turanic 
 wars. It is religion itself that bids him drop his narrow 
 creed and treat Gentiles as his own blood. Again the 
 slave of superstition is liberated through suffering, by the 
 power of love. Sam writes to the Shah, hoping to have his 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 74I 
 
 consent to the innovation. Meanwhile Rudabe's parents 
 must bear their part in the shock of old belief. Dreading 
 the anger of the Shah, and expecting his kingdom to be 
 laid waste, the father is tempted to slay both his daughter 
 and his wife; but the latter's higher faith restrains him, 
 with the saying, " When fire and water, wind and dust, 
 mingle, the old tired earth is refreshed ; " and, " The 
 longest night has its dawning." The brave woman goes 
 further still. She appears before Sam to plead with him 
 at the head of his army, and with no slight effect. Man- 
 oshcihr is shocked at the intermixture of creeds, and sends 
 Sam against Cabulistan with a host whose tread shakes 
 the whole earth, and whose martial movement is described 
 by Firdusi in a passage which is like Chaucer at his best. 
 But the old man cannot face his son's reproachful reminder 
 that he is but repeating the injustice done him in infancy, 
 and both heart and conscience are moved. There is one 
 resort. It is to send Zal himself to make his own impres- 
 sion by pleading his cause with the Shah, armed with a 
 letter in which Sam details his own services, describes his 
 free life in the saddle as a throne, and commends the 
 strength and devotion, which has now all passed into this 
 young hero, to the king's mercy, with prayers and vows. 
 By his noble presence, his skill in answering difficult ques- 
 tions concerning all subjects of physical and moral and 
 religious interest, in a grand tournament of the seers, and 
 by the foresight of his great destiny on the part of the 
 priests, the prejudices of the monarch are overcome, and 
 he consents to the marriage. Whereupon follow festivities 
 that make men ask if the resurrection has not come. The 
 long hates of races and beliefs are dissolved in love. But 
 the significant fact is that the hero's own presence and 
 power determine his fate, and cut the knot of circum- 
 stances that could not otherwise be loosed. 
 
 Such was the parentage of Rustem, mightiest among 
 
742 ISLAM. 
 
 the mighty, — a champion whose glory was not to strangle 
 hydras in his cradle, nor to be dipped in a weapon-proof 
 bath by his mother, like the demigods of Greece, but to be 
 nursed by the heroism of a love which had conquered the 
 prejudices of race and creed. The arm that should crush 
 the foes of Iran was prepared for its work by an inherited 
 nobility of soul capable of recognizing and loving noble- 
 ness under whatever disguise. 
 
 We cannot trace the long-spun web of tragedy, portrayed 
 by the delight of the legend in its favorite hero through 
 centuries, without sense of the lapse of time. We hasten 
 to the tale of the last and heaviest debt paid by this epic 
 redeemer to the limitations of man and the irony of fate. 
 The tale of Rustem and Sohrab is the crucial point of 
 Oriental feeling. Firdusi opens it with an admonition : 
 
 *' The tale of Sohrab will fill your eyes with tears, and stir you 
 against Rustem. But do you blame the autumn wind when it strips 
 the unripe orange from its bough ? Death comes to all, nor was the 
 mystei-y ever solved, nor ever will it be for thee ; for none return from 
 that gate. Do not wonder that fire burns while fuel is given ; or that 
 an old root bears stems. It is vain to murmur at the universal law. 
 Hast thou kept thy soul from evil, thou shalt not fear the last 
 hour. Act well thy part on earth, and blessedness shall meet thee 
 beyond." 
 
 With this serene reconciliation to death as the natural 
 law, opens the story of a whelming catastrophe, which 
 everything that human folly and wisdom could do, seemed 
 but to render the more inevitable. It is followed by the 
 picture, in the same lofty strain, of the close of Rustem's 
 great career, — a sacrifice to deeds of villanous and un- 
 natural hate. 
 
 Sohrab is the child of Rustem's passion for the daugh- 
 ter of a Turanian king, who seeks him out with the offer- 
 ing of her admiration for his heroic deeds, the unasked 
 boon of a heart " never before unveiled to man." Return- 
 
THE shah-nAmeh. 743 
 
 ing to Iran, Rustem is unknown to the boy, who grows up 
 in his father's image, worshipping this unseen ideal through 
 his mother's praises, and longing to behold his face. He is 
 named Sohrab from his ever gladsome looks, — the young 
 lion of the mingled blood of Iran and Turan, irresistible in 
 strength. He forms the plan to invade Iran, and give the 
 throne to his father, forgetting that Rustem, as the loyal 
 servant of his king, must himself first be overthrown. 
 Upon the march the adventures of the young hero are 
 many and marvellous; and the terror of his approach 
 startles Kai Kaus, the king of Iran, into sending in all 
 speed to Rustem, bidding him haste to the rescue, " stop- 
 ping not to finish the word on his lips or to smell the 
 rose in his hand." Rustem's delay leads to a quarrel with 
 the Shah, in which the free spirit of the Pehlevan, and 
 his sensitiveness to unjust suspicion, are brought into full 
 play. The quarrel is appeased, and Rustem advances to 
 meet the Turanians. Henceforward the overruling sweep 
 of Destiny appears at every step. Rustem becomes a spy 
 and slays a Turanian chief, becoming thereby specially 
 obnoxious to Sohrab, who, of course, does not -recognize 
 his person. Looking out on the Iranian army, Sohrab 
 inquires the names of the chiefs ; but Hedshir, a prisoner, 
 who informs him, conceals the fact that Rustem is among 
 them, and gives the colossal form another name. Rustem, 
 he says, is in Seistan, at a feast of roses, — foolishly hoping 
 by this deception to prevent a collision, which, of course, 
 could only be avoided, not by petty lies, but by his know- 
 ing the truth. The poet asks, — 
 
 " Why seekest thou, O Man, the steps of fate to lead ? 
 'T will have its way with thee. 'T is thine to turn 
 Thy heart away from fleeting things, their care and pain." 
 
 Sohrab cannot believe that one like Rustem can be away 
 in the hour of his country's peril, and threatens Hedshir 
 
744 ISLAM. 
 
 with death as a deceiver. But the prisoner, fearing he 
 may kill Rustem and conquer Iran, ventures to brave it 
 out, and holds to the falsehood, though Sohrab strikes 
 him to the earth. The battle follows. Moved perhaps by 
 some blind presentiment, Rustem tarries in his tent. But 
 presentiments and precautions alike fail. Excited by the 
 deeds of the unknown Turanian champion, Rustem at last 
 rushes to meet him. Then an access of pity holds his 
 hand, and he cries, " O tender youth, the earth is cold, the 
 air is sweet. I who am old have slain hosts with my arm. 
 I cannot bear to kill thee, thou art so noble. Come, join 
 Iran, and be our friend." " Thou art Rustem," exclaims 
 Sohrab. But again destiny thwarts the natural instincts, 
 and Rustem denies his own name. " I am but his slave ! " 
 Dreadful necessity, where two souls are unconsciously at 
 one, yet their arms in mortal conflict, their wills forced by 
 sternest illusion to the bitter end ! " Alas," mourns the 
 poet, " every beast knows its place ; man only, in cruel 
 war, cannot discern a son from a foeman." Rustem had 
 been over-confident. He had parted with much of his 
 strength, tliinking it a burden, and now he is flung to the 
 earth, escaping with his life only by demanding of Sohrab 
 a second trial, after which the loser must die. Less willing 
 than ever to confess his name to his antagonist, he returns 
 to his tent, and prays that his old strength may be restored 
 to him. The prayer is granted ; and Sohrab in turn is 
 hurled to the earth and fatally wounded. And now, too 
 late, the dying youth speaks mournfully of Rustem as his 
 father, whom he should never see, though taught by his 
 mother's praises to honor him as the greatest of men, and 
 led forth into Iran only by the longing to see his face. 
 We hear the agonized cry of the old man, " I am Rustem." 
 And Sohrab cannot hold back his terrible sense of wrong : 
 " Art thou Rustem, who hast plunged the sword without 
 mercy in my breast? I sought to move thee to peace, 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 745 
 
 but no love could rise in thee. See this onyx, which my 
 mother bound upon my arm to give to thee, for it is thine. 
 Ah! too late, too late! The father must slay his child." 
 Then Sohrab tenderly tries to stay the raving of grief. It 
 is in vain. What help is there in self-destruction? "Re- 
 member that what has come could not be turned aside. 
 But now bid the king of Iran cease from the war, which I 
 alone have caused ; and Turan has trusted only in me. 
 For I believed we should conquer; how could I have 
 thought to die by my father's hand? So was it written 
 in heaven. I came as the lightning comes, and I pass 
 away like the wind. O Father, in heaven thy child shall 
 meet thee again ! " 
 
 The poem follows step by step the agony of Rustem, 
 and his unavailing efforts to save the fast-fleeting life. He 
 appeals to the king for a potent balsam, which Kai Kaus, 
 with cowardly jealousy, refuses. " Never," says the mes- 
 senger, " did this king pay a friend his dues, nor lift a 
 heavy-laden soul." The sufferer digs the grave of his 
 son with his own hands, seeking for himself only death ; 
 yet pardons the deceitful Hedshir, whose falsehood had 
 brought all the woe. The chiefs vainly try to console 
 him, and the whole land resounds with mourning as he 
 bears his heavy burden to its shrine of sandal-wood in far 
 Cabulistan. Of all the scenes which attend the dreadful 
 calamity, none is more touching than the barbaric grief of 
 the mother, Tahmine. She kisses his armor, and wets his 
 crown with tears. She presses his horse to her bosom, 
 and lays her head upon his hoofs. She closes her palace 
 gates, gives all she has to the poor, and dies of sorrow 
 within a year. There is no remedy in this visible world 
 for wounds so deadly. The heroic age of mighty instincts 
 confesses this, pouring out wails over the hopeless cruelty 
 of fortune and the vanity of the world. Yet we note that 
 there is a robust faith behind the despair; for Rustem 
 
746 ISLAM. 
 
 lives, in spite of his whelming woes, to do heroic work in 
 this world. The religiousness of the poet, casting Rustem 
 for consolation on the future life alone, is manifest injustice 
 to the very ideal which his materials afford. An heroic 
 age may naturally fail to interpret itself to a reflective age 
 through its forms of speech, which spring from the emotions 
 alone. But the language of deeds is universal ; and to see 
 the nobler elements of character struggling forth in this form 
 through the terrible obstacles of a semi-barbarous state of 
 society, is far more interesting than to study the most unex- 
 ceptionable doctrine, which ages of civilization have brought 
 to didactic perfection to serve as the creed of a positive re- 
 ligion, and made the factitious aureole of its founder. 
 
 The dealing of a tragic Nemesis with breaches of the 
 natural relations is again illustrated in the story of Gush- 
 tasp and Isfendiy^r, in which the part of Rustem is again 
 intensely interesting, and by far the most noble. This 
 story belongs to a later period of the epic narrative, and 
 shows signs of an ecclesiastical influence not visible in the 
 more purely heroic portions that precede it. For Gush- 
 tasp is the ruler whose reign is associated in the legend 
 with the advent of Zoroaster, and the conversion of Iran to 
 his religion. Even here, in its treatment of this ideal of 
 the Church, the broadly human element of the heroic 
 ejios counteracts in great degree the narrowing effects of 
 organized religion. 
 
 Gushtasp has repeatedly promised to bestow the throne 
 on his son Isfcndiyar, on condition of his performing well- 
 nigh impossible feats for the glory and safety of Iran, and 
 as often the promise has remained unfulfilled. The seven 
 adventures of the young hero in capturing the famous 
 Brazen Fortress remind us of the labors of Hercules, 
 and perhaps like them have an astronomical origin. They 
 raise him to the summit of glory, but do not secure their 
 earthly reward. Gushtasp now bids him undertake a harder 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 747 
 
 task ; no less than to bring Rustem in chains to his court, 
 that the old Pehlevan's pride may be humbled, and submit 
 itself to the will of a king. For Rustem has dared to say 
 before his face that he is no man's subject, and wears an 
 older crown than that of a Shahan-shah. Isfendiyar shall 
 break this pride, and then the crown shall be his. The 
 prince sees clearly that the aim is to put his expectations 
 out of the way, if not his life, and the outrage to be per- 
 petrated offends everything noble within him. Yet he 
 undertakes it, as he says, out of pure filial duty. " Keep 
 the crown if you will; a father's bidding shall be done, 
 though it bring the judgment day." " If a bad ending 
 come to this, 'tis the power of fate." He is not without 
 hope that the hero will consent to be led in fetters, out of 
 loyalty to the Shah ; and so, by admonitions to the duty 
 of a subject, and praises of Gushtasp as the patron of the 
 faith and head of the priesthood, as well as by promises of 
 protection and reward, the foolish youth would fain per- 
 suade him to an act of servility and shame. Quite as 
 aggravating is the charge of neglecting court attendance 
 to one conscious of being the strong arm that protected 
 the court itself. His reply is noble : " I will give you 
 everything in my power, but do not dishonor the gift by 
 personal outrage. I will appear before the Shah, and do 
 him homage. But the Div must have taken away your 
 senses, if you imagine that I will consent to the indignity 
 of wearing chains." Isfendiyar is moved, but not suffi- 
 ciently to throw up the shameful office. He even adds the 
 insult of neglecting to send for Rustem to a banquet, — after 
 promising to do so, — upon the worse than frivolous ex- 
 cuse that they are likely to meet afterwards as foes. Rus- 
 tem, however, goes without being sent for, but is treated 
 with indignity again, and receives the insulting apology, 
 " that the day was hot and the way long ! " Isfendiyar, in a 
 conceited speech, reproves him for his infidelity and partial 
 
748 ISLAM. 
 
 descent from a Div, Avhich rouses Rustem to recount his 
 exploits, Isfendiyar does the same, laying special stress 
 on his services to the true faith in destroying idols ; and 
 Rustem retorts with reflections on Gushtasp's character 
 and record. In all this, Isfendiyar's conduct shows poorly 
 beside his opponent's ; but so the trouble deepens, rivalry is 
 aroused, and the fates have decreed conflict between them. 
 To Rustem the situation is terrible, since to submit would 
 be intolerable, and to kill Isfendiyar is equally dreadful 
 to so noble a nature. The heroes part at the tent door 
 with bitter words. Isfendiyar's nearest friend warns him 
 not to persevere. " Ahriman has taken you in his net." 
 Zal, on the other hand, forebodes his son's death. It is 
 characteristic of Rustem that he forms a plan to overpower 
 Isfendiyar by main strength, then save his life, and give him 
 the atoning service of love. 
 
 But this generous hope is foiled. The issue of the com- 
 bat is doubtful. Isfendiyar seems to have, in this half- 
 priestly legend, a special aid and protection in strife from 
 his orthodox commission. A quarrel arising between the 
 followers of the t^vo chiefs results in the death of Isfen- 
 diyar's sons. Rustem is roused to indignation at his men ; 
 but his promise to atone in every way possible is received 
 by Isfendiyar ungraciously. Then Rustem cries, " My trust 
 is in God," and renews the fight. But Isfendiyar's arrows 
 all take efiect, while Rustem's glance off from the body of 
 the child of the Holy Law. So Rustem withdraws, sorely 
 wounded, for the night, and Isfendiyar leaves the field to 
 mourn his bitter loss. " Ye noble ones, now so pale, 
 where is the soul that was here? I see but clay." Then 
 he sends to his unrelenting father, " Behold the fruit of the 
 tree you have planted." And to his friend, recovering his 
 calmness, he says, " Cease to mourn. And why should 
 more blood be shed? To death we all go, young and old, 
 and only wisdom can lead us on our way." 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 749 
 
 Meantime Zil for his son's sake burns the Simurgh's 
 feather, and the great bird appears, bringing Nature's heal- 
 ing to his wounds. He shall find an elm by the sea-shore, 
 and cut an arrow from its wood, and with this only, Isfen- 
 diyar can be slain. But whoso slays this sacred life shall 
 never more know peace ; and even beyond the grave shall 
 he find pain. But Rustem braves the condition for the 
 sake of the victory so necessary to his honor. " Good 
 name, at least, will I leave behind me." It is time for him 
 also to resort to occult aids, since his foe has so mani- 
 festly a charmed life. The fate of Isfendiyar now in his 
 hands, Rustem beseeches him, by all they both hold 
 sacred, — "by sun and moon and Zerdusht's fire, and the 
 God to whom we pray," — to abandon his monstrous de- 
 mand, and warns him that he will be slain. Isfendiyar 
 ridicules the prediction, and the fatal arrow, shot with tears, 
 does its work. To his lamenting friends, the hero finds 
 consolation in having led men on the path of the true faith, 
 and that he dies, not by the strength of Rustem, but by the 
 sorceries of Zal. On the other hand, Rustem, made self- 
 reproachful by success, confesses that the Div has caught 
 him in his net, with all his endeavors to be true to manly 
 dealing. " Would that I had been the slain ! Alas, that I 
 resorted to secret arts ! The glory of my name is gone 
 forever ! " It is now Isfendiyar's turn to show a noble spirit. 
 " I blame neither you nor the bird. This is my father's 
 doing, that he might keep his throne." He commits his 
 son to Rustem's charge, to be reared in knightly virtues 
 and honorable toils, and to stand as his father's seed in a 
 line of kings. And Rustem reverently promising, the 
 noble reconciliation is complete. 
 
 Isfendiyar is now his father's Nemesis. " Your desire is 
 accomplished ; your throne is yours, and I have the cham- 
 bers of death. God shall decide between us at the last 
 day." And so, with tender entreaties sent to his mother 
 
750 ISLAM. 
 
 and sisters not to weep too much for him, nor uncover his 
 face, but wait for reunion beyond death, Isfendiyar passes 
 from the scene. Bashutan takes home the body, through 
 mourning Iran, to a court not unaffected by natural grief 
 and shame. 
 
 Then rises the indignant protest of Iranian freedom. 
 The chiefs renounce respect for their king, and cry as one 
 man: "O wretched man, thou sentest him to Cabul that 
 this might be ! May shame weigh down thy crown, and 
 vengeance never let thee go ! " Bashiatan refuses to bend 
 before the throne, and thunders : " Thou blind and selfish 
 man ! the wrath of Heaven shall fall on thee, who hast sent 
 thine own son to death, with heart harder than stone ! " 
 Isfendiyar's sisters recount their brother's virtues, and ask 
 what king before has sought to slay his own flesh. If 
 Isfendiyar desired the throne, did not Gushtasp himself 
 drench the world in blood to obtain the crown of Loh- 
 rasp? Even thee thy father sought not to kill, but took 
 away thy diadem. But thou hast given away thy child for 
 such a bauble ! " The Shah has no word of anger or de- 
 fence, but bids Bashutan comfort the mourners. 
 
 " Softly, O Mother, he sleeps in everlasting peace, glad to be free of 
 earthly woes." 
 
 This last scene, in which the Pehlevans are avengers and 
 smite the cruel king without fear, is politically one of the 
 most suggestive in the whole epic. 
 
 The Oriental theory that the king is the father of his 
 people makes him responsible to a standard of personal 
 character to which the equally patriarchal habit of abso- 
 lute filial servitude should naturally be subordinate. And 
 while for the most part in the Eastern practice this royal 
 patria potcstas has been, as we have found in India and 
 China, as well as in certain stages of old European civil- 
 ization, limited in certain ways by tradition, custom, posi- 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 751 
 
 tive institution, or religious prestige, there is another force, 
 to which it is even more accountable; namely, the ideal of 
 personal heroism. This has been the natural rival of auto- 
 cratic institutions, even under their harshest form. 
 
 It is the chief emancipator from that absolutism which 
 the earliest social traditions secured to the father of a 
 family. The resistance of women and children to this 
 kind of despotism forms a leading trait in the legends of 
 most ancient nations. Military service was almost the only 
 force which effectually diminished the patria potcstas in 
 early Roman times, giving, as it alone did, the right of 
 private ownership {peailium castreiise) to the son. But 
 nowhere did the rights of personality derive such further- 
 ance from the heroic element as in the Iranian family, 
 pictured in the Shah-Nameh. We have seen in the story 
 of Isfendiyar the warning against passive obedience to pa- 
 rental tyranny, even when enforced by royal claims. That 
 of Siavaksh, on the other hand, relates the martyrdom of a 
 prince who refused such obedience for the sake of his own 
 honor and truth. A nobler assertion of the higher law of 
 self-respect was never made in tragedy or song. 
 
 Siavaksh, like Iraj, whose history his fate recalls, is the 
 mirror of gentleness, purity, and valor, — the Sir Galahad, 
 as Rustem is, in some respects, the Sir Tristram, of our 
 epic. Forced against his will to visit the harem, and 
 charged by one of the queens with criminal conduct, in 
 revenge for his refusal to gratify her passion, he is proved 
 innocent by ordeal, and put in command of the army on 
 its march into Turan. Afrasiyab, the king of that country, 
 , alarmed by dreams presaging that Siavaksh will be his 
 destroyer, hastens to offer terms to the invader, to which 
 Siavaksh agrees, in hopes to spare the effusion of blood. 
 The treaty is guaranteed on Afrasiy^b's part by a hundred 
 hostages of his own kindred, who are sent into the Iranian 
 camp. King Kai Kaus, informed of the good news, is 
 
752 ISLAM. 
 
 enraged, and commands his son to break the treaty, ravage 
 Turan, and send the hostages to court to be slain." Sia- 
 vaksh prefers to disobey his father rather than violate his 
 word, and makes haste to send home the hostages safely to 
 Turan. " Above the sun and moon stands the will of a 
 greater King. Before Him the lion is as the blade of grass. 
 Shall I madly rise against Him, and bathe these two lands 
 again in blood?" The hostages shall say to Afrasiyab: 
 " This treaty has brought me to grief; but I will not break 
 my oath to save my throne. The world is my throne, and 
 God my refuge. As I cannot return to Iran, I ask of Afra- 
 siyab leave to pass through his dominions and find rest 
 from this bitter strife." 
 
 The effect of this integrity on the Turanians may be 
 imagined. It is to the honor of the epic that it recognizes 
 the nobler instincts of the heart as human, not as the pre- 
 rogative of the famed race or religion. No personage 
 so moves our sympathy in suffering as Piran, the chief 
 counsellor of Afrasiyab. He advises the king to receive 
 Siavaksh with open arms. " No prince on earth compares 
 with him in body or soul. They tell me that to see him 
 is to love him. It were fit thou shouldst honor him if he 
 had but given up his crown to keep his faith." Afrasiyab 
 fears " what the young lion may do when his teeth are 
 grown ; " but Piran persuades him to write a cordial invi- 
 tation to the young exile. This letter shows not only that 
 the Turanians are regarded as having the same religious 
 sentiment as Iran, but that even Afrasiyab, the evil genius 
 of the epos, is capable of meeting a noble action in a noble 
 way. " Praise be to the Eternal, whom the heart can feel, 
 though none can measure Him, God spare thee such 
 a journey. Stay with me, I will give thee castles and 
 men," So Siavaksh writes sorrowfully and tenderly to his 
 father: "I have walked through fire and wept blood; I 
 have made peace, but my father's heart is like steel towards 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 753 
 
 me. May he live happy, though I fall into the lion's jaws. 
 I know not what fate awaits me, but I can no longer re- 
 main with him." In Piran he finds a second father, as 
 tender as the other was harsh; the old man's youth is 
 renewed as they walk together, while Siavaksh sighs as he 
 remembers his own childhood and Iran. The meeting 
 with Afrasiyab is equally affectionate. " Ended is the 
 world-ravaging war. Now thanks to thee, O youth, that 
 panther and lamb shall feed together, for the world is 
 wearied of strife." He cannot sleep for thinking on this 
 lovely guest. But the courtiers are envious, and the joy 
 of the hour is clouded with evil-boding. Piran, on his 
 part, does not rest till he has Siavaksh married to the 
 daughter of Afrasiyab, and a beautiful city, full of gardens, 
 statues, and all delights, rises amidst perpetual summer as 
 their home. A son is predicted, who shall unite the hos- 
 tile crowns. Love has dissolved the hates of nations and 
 creeds. 
 
 But Piran finds sad presentiments in the heart of -his 
 favorite, and the astrologers confirm his fears. In spite of 
 Piran's encouragement, the vision of war and desolation is 
 before his eyes, and the near approach of death, A Tura- 
 nian chief, the king's brother, who hates Siavaksh for his 
 noble qualities and his success, by villanous falsehoods 
 contrives to fill Afrasiyab's mind with suspicion, and Sia- 
 vaksh is doomed to destruction. Fully aware of his coming 
 fate, the prince sends his wife to Piran, with tender fare- 
 wells, destroys his palace, and goes to meet Afrasiyab's 
 army, on the way to Iran. His little band of followers 
 make no resistance to their enemies, yet are slain ; and 
 he falls, sorely wounded, into the hands of the king of 
 Turan. Afrasiyab is dissuaded from his fell purpose for 
 the moment by his own army, and contents himself with 
 throwing the wife of Siavaksh, his own daughter, into 
 prison, for pleading in her husband's behalf. But Sia- 
 
 48 
 
754 ISLAM. 
 
 vaksh does not escape ; he is murdered by Garsevaz in 
 the wilderness, where a purple flower springs from his 
 blood and is called by his name. 
 
 The murderer is cursed by all men. Piran has the cour- 
 age to rebuke Afrasiyab, and takes Feringis to his own 
 home. In due time Kai Khosru is born, the child of grief 
 and the star of promise. Afrasiyab seeks his destruction, 
 but is persuaded by Piran to consent to his being brought 
 up by peasants, in ignorance of his real origin. But his 
 royal qualities — as those of Krishna, Buddha, Iskander, and 
 the Jesus of the Apocryphal Gospels — can be hidden by 
 no outward conditions ; and at his demand Piran is forced 
 to reveal the secret.^ Over Afrasiyab, too, the youth ex- 
 erts such a charm that the past shall be buried. The 
 cautious Piran suggests that Afrasiyab need not fear the 
 fulfilment of his dreams, since the boy is but half-witted. 
 Khosru personates a fool, and a promise in the name of 
 all that is sacred is exacted from the king that he shall 
 not- be harmed. He is sent to the city of Siavaksh, to be 
 reared amidst the memories of his father's life and death : 
 
 " For Siavaksh the very beasts of the wilderness mourn ; the 
 nightingale in the cypress bewails his fate; and every leaf, as after 
 the autumn blast, hangs withering from the pomegranate tree." 
 
 But Rustem rushes to Kai Kaus, eager to avenge the 
 deed, as well as to rebuke the unnatural father: — 
 
 " O evil one, thy sowing has borne its fruit. Better thou wert in 
 thy grave. Who was so pure, so noble as this prince? Alas! his 
 head, his face, his mighty limbs, the joy of all eyes ! The tracks of 
 his feet were blest ! " 
 
 Then before the king's eyes he kills that wicked queen, 
 to whom he traces the calamity; while Kai Kaus dares not 
 hft his head for shame. 
 
 These legends, of which it is more to my purpose to give 
 the outlines than to indulge in extended quotation, fairly 
 
 * The old messianic legend of all religions. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 755 
 
 illustrate what I should designate as the religion of the 
 Shah-Nameh in its relation with personal freedom. Con- 
 stantly the higher law of honor, sacrifice, love, and truth, 
 asserts itself against the authority traditionally vested in 
 the throne, as well as in the priesthood. Heroism is the 
 true divinity, the practical ruler. Heroic Iran, like Homeric 
 Greece, of which it was the Aryan prototype,^ is deeply 
 conscious of the rights of the personal will as against 
 mighty obstacles, physical and moral. In the epos, these 
 are embodied for the free-souled Pehlevan in the tyranni- 
 cal and unjust will of his king as much as in the enmity 
 of his peers. Never does any noble passion, least of all 
 moral indignation, fail to speak its full protest for fear of 
 irresponsible power. 
 
 When Kai Kaus breaks into rage against Rustem for 
 delaying to answer his summons, Gev asks in astonishment, 
 "Barest thou lift thy hand against Rustem?" "To the 
 block with him ! " screams the king. And Rustem cries 
 out: " It is I that am the lion among men. Let the Shah 
 turn pale before my anger. I owe my strength to God, 
 not to the Shah. My steed is my throne, the world my 
 page, the helm my crown ; and this arm shall defy kings. 
 No slave am I ; to God alone is my service pledged. I 
 have not chosen to be a king, but to follow my duty and 
 my right." Thereupon he rides off from court, and when 
 the king sends to entreat him to return, he replies hotly, 
 "What is Kai Kaus to me? A handful of dust." Finally, 
 the Shah must ask pardon, and " strews dust upon his 
 tongue." 
 
 The scene is curious enough when we contrast it with 
 the common conception of the court of an Oriental despot, 
 or even with the Mahometan ideal, which Firdusi would 
 
 * It must be remembered that the state of society represented by Firdusi is in no sense 
 Mahometan, but everywhere in the epic betrays itself as very much earlier, and resting on 
 what may be a pre- Homeric basis. 
 
756 ISLAM. 
 
 have given us, had he drawn his materials from his own 
 age. This fearlessness of the Pehlevan before his king is 
 all the more remarkable, because combined with pro- 
 foundest reverence for the idea of loyalty to the throne. 
 It seems to hint of creditable elements even in the most 
 servile formalities of Eastern obeisance. Full as these are 
 of apparent man-worship, we find them here combined 
 with an independence such as few modern republicans 
 would dare to show before the popular will, or even the 
 party majority. 
 
 When Zal comes into the presence of Kai Kaus, to 
 advise him against his wild scheme of invading Mazan- 
 deran, it is with measured step, and hands crossed as in 
 prayer; yet he does not hesitate to warn him boldly of the 
 dangers of his ungoverned will. Rustem himself, who 
 spurns the arrogant Kai Kaus, is humble as a servant 
 before the truly royal Kai Khosru, and springs to obey his 
 command to rescue an imprisoned knight. " He bends 
 his head and invokes blessings on the Shah, whom all greet 
 as sovereign, whose feet are on the heads of kings." The 
 just and humane ruler is obeyed with enthusiasm; the 
 unjust one has forfeited all title to his respect. He can 
 assume the part of a Mentor to the young king Tus, and 
 bids him " slay the rebellious, but dry the tears of the sub- 
 missive, as a father. Be ever true ; for life is short, and the 
 world passes away. Even Jemshid fell, the greatest of 
 kings." 
 
 This right to reserve obedience till it is consistent with 
 self-respect, through the real majesty of the person who 
 claims it, is even more strikingly illustrated in Tus, the 
 banner-bearer of Iran, a spleeny, ambitious, and passionate 
 Pehlevan, who regards his own line of descent as of in- 
 comparable grandeur. Kai Khosrfa has been brought from 
 Turan amidst the acclamations of the people, and all the 
 roads are fragrant with spices and radiant with festive 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 757 
 
 colors, and old Kai Kaus makes atonement to the son for 
 casting ofif his father, with tears and embraces before his 
 peers. Tus alone holds aloof from the new star, insisting 
 that the succession belongs to Feriborz, the Shah's son, 
 instead of his grandson ; and braving the indignation of 
 the whole court by his jealous pride. But when he sees 
 Khosru, his prejudice gives way, and he submits at once 
 to an inborn right to rule. This is not all. Kai Kaus 
 himself so far yields to Tus's protest as to consent to give 
 the throne to whichever of the two princes should take the 
 enchanted castle of Bahmen. Feriborz, aided by Tus, 
 fails ; but Khosru, in Semitic style, makes the walls of this 
 Iranian Jericho drop down at the name of God, and the 
 very Divs fall in thousands amidst clouds, thunder, and 
 earthquake ; then enters in the blaze of day, and lights 
 the holy Zerdusht fire. This has a priestly look; but the 
 fall of Tus's pride before the nobleness of Khosru did 
 not need the added sanction of the Church to produce 
 the reconciliation that follows and makes Iran one and 
 happy. 
 
 The same responsibility of kings to the heroic ideal, in 
 whomsoever embodied, runs through the epos, even down 
 to the end of the great Sassanide age. Of these higher 
 claims of magnanimity, justice, and truth, every Pehlevan 
 is the minister. The true line of kings begins in Feridun, 
 "who never saw a wrong or a desolation but he bound it 
 with the chains of virtue, as became a king." This is the 
 " Book of Kings," and it is written to dispense a poetic 
 justice to the doings of kings. The rights of personal will, 
 in their highest and apparently unlimited form, are here 
 affirmed to be duties, and all history is declared to be the 
 evidence. The probe goes deeper than conformity to tra- 
 dition or law: it strikes to the quick of motive. It is 
 dealing with the moral quality of actions, not with their 
 form, however specious. The mythopoetic imagination 
 
758 ISLAM. 
 
 has here constructed the whole history of a people for 
 ages, upon the sway of justice, — laws of retribution above 
 the will of kings. 
 
 Thus the plan of Kai Kaus to wrest the beautiful land 
 of Mazanderan from the wicked Divs of Ahriman might 
 have seemed a service to the faith ; but it is denounced 
 and punished as a mad scheme, because it is undertaken 
 out of the mere love of conquest ; and because, thinking 
 its loveliness existed merely for his own gratification, he 
 masacres its people without mercy. The penalty was for 
 the army to be smitten with blindness, and nearly starved 
 in the wilderness, — a supernatural one, it is true, but in- 
 flicted by evil powers, not by the wrath of God. 
 
 Afrasiyab, the incarnation of Turanian hostility and 
 guile, has many generous qualities ; his counsellor, Piran, 
 is a very noble person, whose advice he frequently follows; 
 his procedure against the innocent Siavaksh is palliated in 
 some measure by the panic into which he has been thrown 
 by presagcful dreams. But none of these things are per- 
 mitted to justify even a king in the murder of so noble and 
 beautiful a guest, and the tree of wrong bears fruit after its 
 kind. Rustem hears of Siavaksh's death, sits awhile over- 
 whelmed with grief, then like a fury descends upon Turan. 
 " Woe to Turan ! Let the land be swept with vengeance, 
 as Gihon bursts its banks ! " Afrasiyab sees his son slain, 
 and escapes, after terrible loss, to the distant provinces, 
 where, driven from place to place, he at last puts himself 
 into the power of a holy man, Hom, evidently the Holy 
 Word,' who takes him in a net ; and Khosru is at hand to 
 slay him, along with the actual murderer of Siavaksh, and 
 poetic justice is satisfied. 
 
 On the other hand, the ideal king is found in Khosru, 
 
 1 The details of this hunt and capture of AfrSsiab, as related in the Shah-Nameh, abound 
 in traits and objects taken from the old Avestan mythology, which we cannot here pause to 
 recount. See Spiegel : Eran- Altcrih., i. 653, 654. 
 
THE SHAH-NAxMEH. 759 
 
 born in suffering, brought up in exile, sought out by he- 
 roes with manifold toils and perils, and brought in flight 
 to his repentant grandfather Kai Kaus, to receive the 
 crown that his father deserved. Some details of the story- 
 are doubtless taken from traditions of Cyrus. But the 
 theory that the two are one rests largely on the common 
 mould in which the religious legend has always cast the 
 early lives of messiahs. Kai Khosru is the ideal of le- 
 gend, the Cyrus of history. Siavaksh, the idolized martyr, 
 seems to all Iran to have risen from the grave in Khosru. 
 He is not only the flower of heroism, but the soul of 
 piety and patriotism. He swears, at his grandfather's 
 command, to give no rest to Afrasiyab, and then spends 
 the night in prayer, with face turned to the holy fire. He 
 is represented as covering the Avesta with pieces of gold ; 
 yet this is previous to the coming of Zerdusht ! His 
 liberality is profuse. He offers great prizes in dresses, 
 servants, and lands to such as shall accomplish certain 
 achievements in the holy war, the greatest being to bring 
 him Afrasiyab's crown. This curious custom is nowhere 
 else mentioned in the Shah-Nameh, but is evidently re- 
 garded as the climax of royal generosity. Khosru is 
 described as barbarically adorned with jewels, and throned 
 upon an elephant, holding the old bull's head mace of the 
 Iranian kings. Princes sit in the dust around him. He 
 drops a golden ball into a cup, the image of Jemshid's 
 world-goblet. The earth shakes with martial music and 
 the tread of hosts, as the nations march before him, and 
 he blesses their chiefs as they pass by. He also gives 
 them counsel at intervals, and sometimes proves himself 
 as profound a moralist and as devout a theist as any 
 Mahometan Sufi.^ The homily to Feramorz shows what 
 the epos regards as the basis of royal authority. 
 
 1 It is manifest that Firdust has in some degree islamized his hero ; but, on the whole, 
 these discourses are in accord with the rest of the epos, and substantially of native quality. 
 
760 ISLAM. 
 
 " Show thyself worthy thy noble birth. Never spur thy horse 
 against the harmless, nor harm them in thine anger. Be ever protec- 
 tor of the poor and consoler of thy people. Never say ' to-morrow.' 
 Flee strife, and trouble none that hurt thee not. Seek not fleeting 
 riches. Build not on the vanity of the world, which now is red, now 
 black. The time hastens on when thou shalt rest in death ; be careful 
 that thy heart accuses thee not, and that thou go hence in peace. God 
 numbers thy breaths. Keep soul and body in cheerfulness, and strive 
 for the true end. So may the Creator keep thee, and cover thy foes 
 with dust." 
 
 To old Rustem he says, in like manner, but with more 
 regard to the fighting man's animal instincts, mingling an 
 epicurean love of wine and pleasure with the philosophy of 
 resignation to the swift lapse of life and the passage of all 
 human grandeur: — 
 
 " Wise is he who thinks not of the morrow. Life is given for joy. 
 Where now are Feridun and Selm and Tur ? Gone ! and their tracks 
 vanished in dust. Why long for treasures, instead of tasting life's 
 joys. Our last treasure is the inevitable grave. Let the night be glad 
 with wine, till morning dawns, and Tus awakes us with call to arms. 
 Man strives and struggles, but all has such issue as Heaven fore- 
 ordains ; joy and sorrow alike go over our heads, and whoso complains 
 thereof is without sense. If God stands by me, I will avenge my 
 father's death." 
 
 It is a curious mixture of Islam and Iran. The stormy 
 passion for physical stimulus is natural enough, but fate 
 and foreordination do not properly belong to the Iranian 
 mind. Yet the combination is by no means impossible, 
 and contempt for treasures that can be laid up on earth 
 well becomes the hero who is forever facing death. 
 
 The chiefs are commanded to wage war humanely: — 
 
 " Ravage not the land on the march, nor harm the peaceable and 
 industrious. Be merciful towards the unarmed, for short is rest in this 
 earthly dwelling." 
 
 Khosru punishes offenders with a lofty justice that is 
 recognized by all. Dying warriors ask of Fate only this, 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 76 1 
 
 to see Kai Khosru once before they die. He gratefully 
 remembers the virtues of Piran, and his protecting care, 
 mourning that at last he so turned against Iran that he 
 must needs be slain ; and treating his body not as a foe- 
 man's, but embalming it, and seating it on a throne in 
 armor, in the resting-place of kings. He is himself mag- 
 nanimous, pardoning the Turanian foe as soon as he pleads 
 for mercy. After a hard-won victory, he chivalrously pro- 
 tects the wives of Afrasiyab, listening with softened heart 
 as they plead against his merited anger. His speech to the 
 soldiers is beyond the Mahometanism of Firdusi's day, and 
 the poet seems to have caught it from some great fountain 
 of wisdom and mercy, from which he drew through all that 
 portion of his work which covers the Sassanian time : — 
 
 " All Turan, as well as Iran, will be your iTome. Cast away then 
 every thought of revenge, and make the land happy by your mercy ; 
 for the people are stricken with fear. I give you the wealth of Turan, 
 and ask only this in return. Try to do right. As you have felt the 
 winter, carry with you the spring. It is unworthy of you to strike the 
 fallen. Turn your eyes from lust. Respect property. So shall ene- 
 mies turn to friends. He who would please me, must abstain from 
 desolating the land, and call him who does so accursed." 
 
 The close of Khosru's reign betrays the hand of Islam. 
 As perfect king, in himself and by contrast with Kai 
 Kaus before and Gushtasp after him, he must crown his 
 life by renouncing the world, of which he has seen all the 
 glory and the vanity, and receive that celestial reward 
 which puts earthly thrones to shame. Reflecting that he 
 might easily fall like Jemshid, remembering his mixed 
 blood, content to have accomplished justice on his father's 
 murderers, and to have made himself the terror of infi- 
 dels and evil-doers, Khosru secludes himself in his palace 
 to prepare for his withdrawal by solitude and prayer. 
 This contempt of the visible world, so utterly opposed 
 to Persian traditions, naturally enough excites the alarm 
 
^62 ISLAM. 
 
 of his whole court; and the chiefs, through the aged 
 Zal, entreat him not to abandon his pubhc duties, clearly- 
 intimating that his conduct looks like possession by Ahri- 
 man. But no explanation is given them, except a desire 
 to obtain the peace of God and a place in Paradise. A 
 dream, in which the Persian Saviour Sosyosh plays the 
 extraordinary part of summoning him to divide his goods 
 among the poor and prepare to enter the everlasting light 
 out of this dark world, confirms his purpose. The most 
 remarkable feature of this exalted mood is his homily to 
 the peers, who return from fierce war with Turan to hear 
 themselves exhorted not to weep for his departure, " since 
 all must die, and every one cries out to the Creator, when 
 he has grown old and weary, ' Take me to thy rest ! '" He 
 will pray for them, and they must spend seven days in 
 joy. Of course they believe him mad. Then he tells old 
 Gudarz to pour balsam into wounds ; to spend, not hoard ; 
 to build the hospice and rebuild fallen towns ; to console 
 the afflicted ; to keep the holy fire burning. Gifts of prov- 
 inces and fiefs are lavished on the best. " Tell me now 
 what else ye need, for the shepherd is to leave his sheep." 
 He appoints his successor, who is unwillingly yet loyally 
 received, and takes tender leave of his family. Then, ac- 
 companied by the people in procession, he sets out for a 
 distant mountain ; but before reaching it, dismisses all but 
 three Pehlevans, who refuse to leave him, and who, in ful- 
 filment of his warning, are buried in a snow-storm, during 
 which he is taken up to heaven, while they sleep their last 
 sleep. 
 
 Such for the epos is the reward of ideal royalty: to 
 escape the evil hand of disease, old age, and common 
 death ; to be translated by its own will to divine abodes. 
 And such the power possessed by the true king to bring 
 his whole people to sacrifice all their interests to satisfy 
 his sense of a divine duty. The mixture of Mahometan 
 
THE SHAH-nAmEH. 763 
 
 pietism with Iranian heroism here is not easy to analyze ; 
 but the main fact shown is, that the Iranians had an ideal 
 of royal virtue which was more to them than the mere 
 person of a king ; and that the Pehlevan who could allow 
 a Khosru to give up the whole State at the command of 
 his convictions, would also resist a Kaus to his face, like 
 Rustem ; or, like Bezhan, rebuke a Gushtasp for cruel 
 treachery towards his own son. 
 
 But the ideal king or hero does not so well illustrate the 
 genius of the time and people as the real central figure of 
 the epic action, who embodies alike the merits and the 
 faults of the civilization, the positive conflict of good and 
 evil that its conditions require. Rustem is a creature of 
 mighty instincts, which are dowered with the strength of 
 a hundred men. He is the child of the fierce strife be- 
 tween Iran and Turan, but combines with its passions a 
 chivalrous humanity hardly compatible with them from the 
 modern point of view. At drinking and club-swinging 
 even Iblis cannot compete with him. After a boastful 
 drinking-bout with seven chiefs on a hunting-party, he 
 rises up from Zabul wine to defeat Afrasiy^b's host, and 
 then spares the fallen, and scorns to rob the dead. Div 
 or dragon, thirst or cold, are as unable to cope with his 
 purely human strength as are the warriors of Turan, when 
 he goes, all alone, to free the spell-bound army of the 
 reckless King Kaus in Mazanderan ; but he is so tender- 
 hearted that he does not fail to pray for them all, " because 
 though all sinners in God's sight they are nevertheless 
 His children." His talk is fresh with natural emotion, and 
 there are few pictures in the epic so charming as his inter- 
 view with a beautiful youth on the borders of a stream, 
 ending in unbounded surprise and joy when this charmer 
 reveals himself as the young Kai Kobad, the true prince 
 whom he had come from Iran to seek, and bring back to 
 the throne of his fathers. His merciless revenue for Sia- 
 
764 ISLAM. 
 
 vaksh upon the son of Afrasiyab, reaching even to the muti- 
 lation of his remains, when the youth had actually pleaded 
 for his life on the strength of his love for the martyred 
 prince, is as barbarous as Achilles' wrath against Hector. 
 For when he confronts Pilsem, Afrasiyab's brother, doing 
 wonders in the battle, he pities him, and sighs that so much 
 manliness must die so young. His similar pity for Sohrab, 
 and his terrible agony of grief and madness when he finds 
 he has slain his own son, have already been described. 
 When Bezhan is found to have been inveigled into the 
 power of Afrasiyab by Gurgin, his envious companion, and 
 Rustem is going alone to deliver him, and the whole court 
 is anxious and indignant, demanding the punishment of 
 the offender, Rustem pleads for his forgiveness, " because 
 he has repented, and if he be now cast from grace, his spirit 
 will be broken." We have seen how superior Rustem is in 
 moral manhood to the champion of the faith, Isfendiyar, 
 in refusing, at his demand, to soil his noble fame with 
 even the outward pretence of bondage. So the differ- 
 ence between Rustem's seven adventures or labors in de- 
 livering Kai Kaus from Mazandcran and the seven feats 
 of Isfendiyar in taking the Brazen Fortress, is greatly to 
 the advantage of Rustem, both in regard to motive and 
 detail. He goes alone, without a word of direction or a 
 hand of help, through perils of which he has no foreknowl- 
 edge. Isfendiyar goes with an army, learns from a prisoner 
 of war what he is to meet, accomplishes his object by 
 deception, and ends by barbarously massacring his foes. 
 Rustem acts from spontaneous desire to save his coun- 
 trymen and his king. Isfendiyar acts partly from unques- 
 tioning obedience to his father's command, indeed, but with 
 the ulterior hope of acquiring the crown. 
 
 In every great national peril, Rustem holds the fate 
 of Iran in his hands, and seems to have a permanent 
 commission from her guardian gods to save her, lasting 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 765 
 
 through many generations of mortal men. This vast re- 
 sponsibility, with the personal self-abnegation it involves, 
 gives his whole life the highest ethical interest, maintained 
 as it is both by the terrible fatalities of the circumstances 
 by which he is continually tortured and finally slain, and 
 by the lofty courage with which in spirit he meets and 
 conquers them, while subject to them in the flesh and in 
 the affections. This mighty struggle of solitary human 
 strength against overwhelming necessity for a whole epic 
 period is essential tragedy. His exposure to the intoler- 
 able rancor and caprice of Kai Kaus, the prodigious odds 
 against him in the strife he must wage against enemies 
 visible and invisible, the anguish of discovering that he 
 has killed his own child in unnatural fight, the attempt of 
 Gushtasp to outrage his honor and humiliate him in his 
 old age before the court, and the insulting conduct of Is- 
 fendiyar, constitute a series of adversities unsurpassed in 
 heroic legend ; and in no case does he sink below the level 
 of his conviction and self-respect. That in the conflict 
 forced on him by Isfendiyar he should be obliged to accept 
 the terrible condition, that if he should slay the champion 
 of orthodoxy he must expect no relief from pain here or 
 hereafter, lifts Rustem to the position of a martyr to the 
 right of protest against ecclesiastical pretensions to rule 
 the fate of the soul. The same honor was foreshadowed in 
 his mixed blood, and in the reputation of his family and 
 province, for non-conformity. In that part of the Shah- 
 Nameh tradition which relates to the closing events of his 
 career, and which has marks of priestly interference, Rus- 
 tem bears the burden of infidelity; yet even here the 
 nobler impartiality of the national tradition in large meas- 
 ure overcomes the evident purpose of Firdusi to take the 
 orthodox side. As we have already said, the old Iranian 
 mythology, heroic rather than technically religious, looks 
 not at the creed but at the manhood of its Pehlevans, who 
 
 1 
 
^66 ISLAM. 
 
 are all of more or less Turanic blood. Rustem every- 
 where represents this breadth of spiritual sympathy, and 
 is quick to be reconciled with his bitterest foes ; as where 
 he so readily accepts the charge of Isfendiy^r's son, con- 
 fided to him by the dying prince from whose terrible 
 arrows he had just escaped. And at last, in the successful 
 plot of his enemies to lure him on to his destruction, his 
 generous confidence is their main reliance for accomplish- 
 ing the crime. 
 
 Rustem is great enough to see life as a whole, and to 
 find the solution for its ironies, wrongs, and failures, in 
 renouncing the- self-indulgence of ease, and in living for the 
 law of duty. Of course, this statement must be interpreted 
 in accordance with the age and the race in which the char- 
 acter was mythically conceived and developed. But what- 
 ever Firdusi has added to the simple traditions of a heroic 
 age is but the self-conscious rendering of instincts really 
 existing in that age, and determining the conduct of its 
 typical men. The spectacle of a battle-field where dead 
 heroes are strewn like wrecks, draws from him this phi- 
 losophy, which, as instinct, is thoroughly natural : — 
 
 " Regard the world from whatsoever point, you will see grief, anxiety, 
 and pain. The ever-turning wheel brings sometimes strife and looison, 
 sometimes the sweetness of love. But whether we die in one way or 
 another, let us not be troubled about the why or how ; but depart 
 when our time comes, regardless of the turns of fate. Be the God of 
 victory our trust, and perish the fortune of our foes." 
 
 But a more lofty place is reached in his unselfish service 
 of his country. He is without ambition to make himself 
 prominent, or to claim the reward he could so easily exact. 
 He is the Washington or Cincinnatus of old Iran; and 
 when he has saved her life, he more than once avoids the 
 ovations prepared for him, and modestly begs leave to with- 
 draw to his loved Seistan and the ancestral house. " O 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. '^Q'j 
 
 King ! thou art full of goodness, but I long to behold the 
 face of Zal." 
 
 With Rustem and Zal ends the heroic race of Seistan, — 
 Titans of Nature and freedom, paladins of an earlier chiv- 
 alry, foreshadowing at once the Arab sheikh, the knights 
 of Arthur's Round Table, and the demigods of Scandi- 
 navia and Greece, as well as a class of ardent and powerful 
 leaders in all times; combining acceptance of inevitable 
 things like death with robust faith in valor and freedom, 
 and keen instincts for this world's savors and bodily de- 
 lights. Firdusi's portraits are touched with the color of 
 Islam, but their forms and features are essentially old Per- 
 sian, He has made the legend read its own lesson, how 
 sorrow and death have their will at last, with all this cour- 
 age and passion, this strength before which the earth 
 trembles and demons flee ; and how the sense of immor- 
 tality is identified with heroic doing and suffering in this 
 earthly life. These lessons of all ages are nowhere more 
 distinctly or more pathetically pronounced than in the 
 Shah-Nameh. 
 
 The story of Piran represents the tragedy of a situation 
 in which the penalties of a bad cause fall on the good men 
 who are in some way forced to serve it. We see the wise, 
 thoughtful, brave, and humane counsellor of Afrasiyab striv- 
 ing all his life loyally to serve his king, in a broad and 
 noble spirit ill suited to the task. The story of his love 
 and protecting care for the exiled Siavaksh and for his 
 son Kai Khosru, which we have already given in outline, 
 is a picture of surpassing moral beauty. But neither 
 Firdusi nor the Iranian chiefs render his conduct the ad- 
 miration it deserved. Firdusi, in fact, ascribes to him a 
 certain insincerity, where the interest of his cause was 
 concerned, which seems to be nothing more than justifi- 
 able reticence towards the enemy of his country. His ap- 
 peal to Rustem, against the continuance of the barbarous 
 
768 ISLAM, 
 
 war of Iran and Turan, is certainly very noble. Rustem 
 replies with the warmest testimony to his rectitude, but 
 offers only impracticable conditions of peace, one of which 
 is that Piran himself shall come over to the Iranian side, 
 with the promise of great reward. Piran sees that the 
 demands cannot be agreed to, but will carry them to 
 Afrasiyab. In the council of war they are rejected, and 
 Piran, positively refusing on his own part to forsake his 
 king and country, though their ruin seemed certain, re- 
 turns to the Iranian camp with the irritating decision, to 
 be met with violent reproaches. Firdusi seems to echo 
 these, and says that Piran retired with his lips full of lies 
 and his head of plans of revenge. But surely the old 
 chiefs indignation at being asked to turn traitor was credit- 
 able ; and as for the lies, we are not told what they were 
 nor what was their motive. On another occasion the same 
 proposals are made to Piran by Gudarz, another Pehlevan ; 
 and again the hero refuses either to give up Afrasiyab's 
 nearest relatives to be punished with death, or to leave 
 the service of his king. His proposal to spare human 
 life by reducing the war to a single duel is denounced by 
 Gudarz with unfeeling contempt; yet the Iranians are 
 by and by glad to accept a similar one, — that of a fight 
 between twelve champions on each side, thus justifying 
 Piran's judgment. 
 
 Even Afrasiyab turns against his faithful counsellor, and 
 the heavy burden of a lost cause falls upon the head of 
 the best among its supporters. He is oppressed by fore- 
 bodings, and sees the setting of his own sun. In every 
 duel the Iranians are victorious, and Piran falls under the 
 spear of Gudarz, who savagely drinks his blood in re- 
 venge for Siavaksh, — the last refinement of irony, since 
 Piran was the exile's one saviour and friend. In their 
 touching lament over his dead body, his brothers dwell 
 on the sadness of his destiny, recalling the old saying, 
 
THE SHAH-NAmEH. 769 
 
 " No burial shall he have, nor grave-clothes ; and his bleed- 
 ing body shall be carried about by his foes." " All is 
 over with him, and the wind has swept all his labor away." 
 Even Kai Khosru, who owes to him his throne and his 
 life, condemns him for sacrificing everything to his love 
 for Afrasiyab. The poet also utters over him this mourn- 
 ful plaint : — 
 
 " So false and treacherous is the coursetof things, mixing rise with 
 fall. 
 The wise man sees with pain how Fate promises and fulfils not." 
 
 The religion of the Shah-Nameh is purely monotheistic. 
 Retaining the fire-symbol, the Amesha-9pentas, and Crao- 
 sha, yet very inconspicuously, it treats Ahriman, not as 
 co-equal with the supremely good spirit, but merely as the 
 power of evil in human conduct; so that he appears as 
 the name of any man who is on the wrong side. We have 
 not Ahriman, the devil, as God, but men who are " Ahri- 
 mans," or " devils." In fact, the personal Ahriman had 
 long given way to a more intensely exclusive power than 
 Ormuzd, and was lost in the God of Islam. But this Se- 
 mitic worship is inspired by the heroic traditions of Iran 
 and humanized by the personal qualities of the great 
 Pehlevans of the epos. Firdusi's views of life, fortune, 
 destiny, and the future life were Mahometan ; but there 
 was no escaping the free, democratic, self-asserting, this- 
 world spirit of the legend with which he had to deal. 
 The reign of Gushtasp, indeed, introduces a new element 
 into the legend itself, — the hand of Zoroastrian ortho- 
 doxy. Down to that period the poem knows no impas- 
 sable religious line between Iran and Turan. The prayers 
 and vows of Afrasiyab cannot be distinguished, either in 
 form or substance, from those of Rustem or Kai Khosru. 
 Iran has no monopoly of virtue or of piety. The impar- 
 tiality of the heroic stand-point is complete. But with the 
 
 49 
 
770 ISLAM. 
 
 advent of Zerdusht, in the days of Gushtasp, it is other- 
 wise. Lohrasp, his successor, a scion of a new race, is 
 noted only for building a national altar for the reformed 
 faith, and for transferring the court to Balkh, conformably 
 to the traditions which ascribe the origin of Zoroastrianism 
 to eastern Iran. Firdusi celebrates Zerdusht as " a tree 
 reaching to heaven, with deep roots and many branches ; 
 its fruit wisdom, its leaves knowledge ; who is fed by it 
 shall never die." " The tracks of his feet were blessed." 
 He brings a vase of fire from paradise to Iran's king, 
 bidding him accept God the creator, and the true religion, 
 and Gushtasp obeys. He plants a cypress, on whose 
 bark he writes the creed, with the ancient history of Iran, 
 and surrounds it with palace walls. Wherein this creed 
 differed from the old theism of the Pehlevans for a thou- 
 sand years does not appear, except that the epos itself 
 becomes narrower in its sympathies, as if under the in- 
 fluence of a positive Zoroastrian Church, seeking to im- 
 pose itself on the freer theism of the princedoms of Iran 
 and Turan. The myths no longer rise to the old univer- 
 sality and freedom. They are in the interest of Zoroaster. 
 The war with Turan becomes a family religious war. The 
 Prophet even appears in old age at court, and forbids 
 tribute to the Turks, who in turn denounce Iran for fall- 
 ing away from the faith into superstition. This surprising 
 turn in the spirit of the epos corresponds with an equally 
 unexplained change in the political relations of the two 
 peoples. The mastery over Turan, gained by Kai Khosru 
 at such cost, and apparently so decisive, has disappeared, 
 and in its place is a long-recognized right of Turan to 
 demand tribute of his successors. Gushtasp, the political 
 founder of orthodoxy, has the old role of a national re- 
 deemer, to be driven off by his father into exile, and to 
 return master of the situation and be crowned as the true 
 king; but his glory, of course, fades in the brighter star 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 771 
 
 who succeeds him. Isfendiyar, subjected to the same 
 persecution and peril in his youth, learns his high func- 
 tion through suffering, and becomes the champion of the 
 Church, despatched to convert the world and punish the 
 noble old heretic of Seistan. 
 
 But we have seen that even during this period the eccle- 
 siastical spirit is so strongly antagonized by the heroic 
 element, that in spite of the poet's apparent sympathy it 
 really plays an ignoble and inferior part And it is soon 
 succeeded by new epical constituents, — Semitic, Egyptian, 
 Greek, — in which we find the same predominance of the 
 heroic over the technically religious. 
 
 It is for the life of world-famous Iskander that Firdust 
 begins to draw on other than native sources. Queen 
 Humai rules wisely, and her child Darab is a new ideal for 
 the mythologists. He is put through the conventional 
 process of exposure to death, wonderful deliverance, and 
 final ascension to his destined throne in spite of every 
 obstacle. Cast into the Euphrates in a chest, he is rescued, 
 and brought up in ignorance of his birth till the time 
 comes to take his crown. He marries the daughter of 
 Philikus, king of Rum, and Iskander is their child. He, 
 too, is supplanted by Dara, a younger half-brother, and 
 must resort to invasion to secure his rights. The story 
 of Rustem and Isfendiyar finds an echo in that of the Ira- 
 nian King Dara (Darius), defeated and assassinated, but 
 before his death reconciled with Iskander, to whose care 
 he commends his children. Thus Iran legitimates Alex- 
 ander's conquest, and claims him as her own. The 
 epos makes him confirm all the liberties of Iranian feudal- 
 ism, modify the harem by abandoning forced supplies of 
 women, and generously maintain all Sufis, or holy men, 
 besides prohibiting injustice generally. From this point 
 the epos continues on the large track of universal ethics 
 and religion. In the new and in many respects peculiar 
 
772 ISLAM. 
 
 instance of Iskander, Firdlasi still holds to the supreme 
 significance of heroism, which belongs to the Iranian 
 consciousness, though much of his material is drawn 
 from the Graeco-Egyptian pseudonymic romance of Cal- 
 listhenes. Alexander's infancy, accession, and achieve- 
 ments are constructed on the conventional mythic mould, 
 to show that wrong and suffering can only testify to the 
 sovereignty of justice in human events. But after acquir- 
 ing the throne which had been unjustly given to another, 
 Iskander endures no more suffering, either from his own 
 sins or those of other men. He is all-victorious, as he is 
 all-noble. But none the less necessary is it that he should 
 learn the conditions of mortal existence, the folly of ex- 
 travagant desires, the vanity of self-exaltation, the sove- 
 reignty of Fate, and find freedom only in accepting the 
 supreme order of the world. East, West, North, and South 
 yield to his victorious arms. Yet the emphasis falls after 
 all upon solitary personal experiences, whose meanings 
 are conveyed miraculously to his senses, as in parables, 
 lessons of moral wisdom, symbols of truth and duty, pro- 
 phetic intimations of death from Nature and from man. 
 And so the epos, which had been purely heroic, becomes 
 with Iskander distinctly ethical and didactic. 
 
 His personality is overwhelming. In the disguise of a 
 messenger from Iskander he goes fearlessly into hostile 
 camps and courts; but as his superiority to his play- 
 fellows betrayed him in his childhood to be the destined 
 king, so nothing can hide his majesty when masquerading 
 in these maturer functions. " Go free," says the Arabian 
 queen to the seeming envoy who is astonishing her court, 
 " for the very dust of the earth knows that thou art thy- 
 self Iskander." Yet around this world-master gather the 
 mysterious intimations of a law higher than his own will, 
 of the transiency of human pride and human praise. The 
 legend makes Iskander great enough to feel these rebukes, 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 773 
 
 and to see the plane where king and subject are equal. 
 The Brahmans tell him that desire is the hell of his soul, 
 and the essence of punishment. His cheeks blanch and 
 eyes fill with tears, and he goes away silent. In Ha- 
 besh a voice speaks to him from a dead king on a 
 throne of gold, saying, — 
 
 " Thou hast destroyed many thrones and lifted thy head to heaven ; 
 but the time of thine own departure is come." " His face becomes 
 crimson, and he departs with a wound at his heart." 
 
 Following a sage far away into the sunset of the deep, 
 and beyond an immeasurable city, he pursues the fount of 
 immortality. But in the dark he loses his guide. The 
 sage finds what he seeks, but the king fails. Then the 
 generosity and devoutness of an unbeliever, Faghfur the 
 emperor of China, puts the great conqueror to shame, 
 teaching him that true religion forbids the doing of evil 
 to any, and that a true gift, however bounteous, is given, 
 not as service to any earthly king, but to God. The angel 
 Israfil, the speaking birds, the field of riches that it is as 
 dangerous to leave as to take, the omens of coming death, 
 admonish the world-master that self-indulgence is foolish 
 and vain. Finally, reason and philosophy have their good 
 work in him, through Aristalis (Aristotle), who dissuades 
 him from the Oriental policy of putting to death by treach- 
 ery all living members of the royal family of Iran (Kaian- 
 ides) who might afterwards revolt against his dynasty. 
 The philosopher conjures him to do injury to none of 
 these princes, but rather, by generous treatment, to turn 
 every one into a bulwark of his throne ; and Iskander is 
 man enough to consent. When he dies, his obsequies are 
 performed by sages who moralize on the lessons of his 
 life in the spirit of the old Bible text: " I have said, ye are 
 Gods ; but ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the 
 princes." The poet's comment is this : — 
 
774 ISLAM. 
 
 " Iskander is gone, and lives only in men's words. He slew thirty- 
 six kings : see what remains in his hands ! He built ten fair cities, 
 which now are deserts ; he aspired to what none else had achieved; 
 East and West repeat his story, — and there is the whole. Behold, 
 the word [of God] is best ; never shall it, like these old palaces, be 
 the prey of winds and rains." 
 
 Ignoring the foreign dynasties which succeeded Alex- 
 ander, the epos reopens with Ardeshir Babegan, the re- 
 storer of the faith. This national saviour, like the other 
 heroic ideals, begins his career in obscurity, and reaches 
 the throne by his own resistless will. His reign is con- 
 ceived in the same ethical and didactic spirit as that of 
 Iskander. Through the whole Sassanide period the kings 
 are preachers, and deliver long addresses or exhortations 
 in a high moral strain to their nobles or their children. 
 The proverbial lore of these ages seems to have been 
 treasured up in the form of homilies, and ascribed by the 
 nation as by its epic bard to the kings of the great race of 
 Sassan. To these, even heroic achievements are secondary. 
 We might fancy ourselves fallen on a line of Stoic kings. 
 Ardeshir's person, however, is of the old Pehlevan type, — 
 " beautiful as the sun, a lion in fight and a Venus in feasts." 
 His youthful feat of mastering the fortunes that went with 
 the possession of a mysterious worm found by a damsel 
 in an apple, and by whose spinning a peasant's family 
 became a mighty empire, is doubtless a mythic version 
 of Iranian relations with the land of silk ; and the hero's 
 device of entering the castle of this famous guardian worm 
 in guise of a merchant simply follows the model of earlier 
 heroic legends. These stories are a curious opening of 
 the Sassanide portion of the epos, and seem to show that 
 Firdijsi must have confined himself faithfully to the older 
 materials before him, since he would hardly have invented 
 such a porch as this to the grandest period of the national 
 life. 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 775 
 
 Ardeshir ascends the throne of Gushtasp with the proc- 
 lamation that his " empire is justice, and that he is the 
 asylum of mankind, the open audience-chamber for all." 
 But as the older heroes were mighty in deeds, so is Arde- 
 shir in moral wisdom ; and he includes the whole religious 
 law in practical duties. 
 
 " Rich is he who is content : do thou resist cupidity, and hate 
 strife. Be not anxious about the future, nor mortified at the past ; 
 nor mix in affairs not thy own. Regulate thy heart by God's com- 
 mands. Resist deceit. Honor the king as your life ; but if the king 
 does not protect you against oppression, his royalty abandons him. 
 May my subjects be happy by my justice." 
 
 To his son Shapur he thus discourses of true kinghood: 
 
 " A throne may be overturned in three ways, — if the king is un- 
 just ; if he favors unworthy persons ; if he hoards his wealth. The 
 means of the cultivator are the riches of the kingdom. It is the king's 
 business to see that they bring him fruit. Have courage to shut 
 thine eyes to sins committed against thee. When the king is angry, 
 the wise man finds him of little worth. Fear not to be generous. Do 
 not play at wine and feasting, but remember the excitement of wine 
 exhausts the body. Speak not overmuch, and make no show of your 
 virtue ; listen to all, and remember the best. Make not friends 
 thoughtlessly. Treat not the poor with contempt when he seeks you. 
 Put not a bad man on the throne. Pardon the penitent, and avenge 
 not the past. Be a providence to all men. In five hundred years 
 your descendants will have gone over to Ahriman, and the land will 
 be a desert. May God protect, and all good men aid you ! " 
 
 The right of revolution against kings, and their respon- 
 sibility to the laws of personal and private duty, as here 
 set forth in precepts, are in entire accord with the spirit 
 , of the older legends of Kai Kaus, Gushtasp, and other 
 arbitrary monarchs. 
 
 The legendary story of Bahram-gur, a king who shares 
 with Nushirvan the worship of all later Iranian tradition, is 
 here in point. Yezdegerd, "the Wicked," maltreats his son 
 Bahram, and sends him to Arabia, where he is educated 
 
'j'je ISLAM. 
 
 by the king of Yemen and his sage. Conceited, presump- 
 tuous, and cruel, Yezdegerd conceives himself in no need 
 of Divine aid ; and his death by the kick of a horse is 
 set down as a judgment on his sins, which perhaps really 
 consisted in some offence to the priestly class. Many of 
 the nobles claim the crown, but all unite at last in placing 
 Khosru, a good old man, on the throne, and the army sus- 
 tains their action. Bahram, returning from Arabia, appeals 
 to the chiefs, who, after discussion, agree to choose a king 
 out of a hundred persons, of whom Bahram is one. In 
 opposition to the direct line of Yezdegerd, the mutilated 
 victims of his cruelty are brought out to prevent the elec- 
 tion of Bahram ; who, indeed, finally persuades the assem- 
 bly to select him, but not till he has promised to do justly, 
 and has shown his heroic qualities by fighting a lion. Then 
 Khosru himself salutes him ; he gives his adhesion to the 
 law of Zoroaster, remits arrears of taxes, and the land is 
 filled with joy. 
 
 On this free choice of the local chieftains follows an 
 ideal reign. The king discovers the hidden treasure of 
 Jemshid, but refuses to keep it, on the ground that the 
 king should receive only what is earned by justice and the 
 sword, and orders its distribution among the poor : — 
 
 " Why take the fruits of the toil of dead kings ? Why open my 
 heart to the greed of gold? I am not bound to this fleeting world. 
 My throne and my head deserve curses, whenever one of my subjects 
 can complain of my injustice." 
 
 The legend delights in making Bahram a kind of royal 
 providence moving about among the people in disguise, 
 righting wrongs, bestowing treasures heaped up by fraud, 
 on deserving poor or otherwise unfortunate persons. For 
 a season falling into luxurious ease and self-indulgence, 
 he is roused by an invasion to instant self-recovery. And 
 when he discovers that his indiscriminate bounties caused 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. TJJ 
 
 mischief in many ways between the rich and poor, he 
 seeks out wiser methods. Such measures as abolishing 
 taxation, and importing Indian jugglers to amuse the peo- 
 ple, may or may not have been improvements ; but his 
 moral homilies are of the most liberal and lofty tenor, 
 and during his reign Iran was, we are assured from other 
 sources, an asylum of all persecuted faiths. Christians, 
 Gnostics, Manichaeans, Buddhists, Jews, all mingled in the 
 religious and political ferment, which was prevented from 
 overturning the monarchy by the stringent hand of the 
 Zoroastrian Church. The narrowness and intolerance of 
 this institution, as we know it in history, hardly comports 
 with the noble precepts placed by epic tradition in the 
 mouths of nearly all the Sassanide kings. But these pre- 
 cepts are still less in harmony with the autocratic faith 
 of Islam, or with the fatalism of the Koran. They are 
 probably, as Mohl suggests, and as their simple and often 
 primitive character shows, really the remains of old Persian 
 wisdom, treasured up in or before the days of Nushirvan.^ 
 We shall soon see how powerful was the influence of this 
 national literature on the spirit of Islam itself and the sects 
 that sprung from its bosom. 
 
 It is suggestive of a Persian rather than of a Mahometan 
 origin of these ethical sayings, that the people are brought 
 strongly into view as murmuring against the luxury of the 
 rich, and complaining of their own disadvantages. It was 
 upon feelings of this sort that the communist Mazdak 
 wrought with such effect that he came near overturning 
 the social order of Iran. The king, Kobad, became his 
 convert, and the palace was beset by crowds of malcon- 
 tents. Bahram, finding the treasury empty in consequence 
 of these disorders, abandons the throne in discouragement, 
 hopeless of the evil world. He is succeeded nominally 
 by Kobad, but really by Mazdak, whose eloquence and 
 
 1 Mohl, vi. V. 
 
778 ' ISLAM. 
 
 ambition raised him to the office of treasurer, where he 
 readily took advantage of the destitution prevaihng among 
 the people, to overturn the existing social order. " What 
 shall be done," he asks the king, pointedly, " with one who 
 refuses to heal one bitten by a serpent, with a remedy 
 which he held in his hand? How much more should he 
 be punished who holds back bread from starving men ! " 
 Armed with the very natural replies to these questions, 
 Mazdak proceeds to break down property rights, and to 
 consign all things to communistic pillage. He is said to 
 have distinctly proclaimed equality of property and com- 
 munity of wives. This doctrine so flourished, says the 
 epic, that no one dared oppose it. Prince KhosrCi, after- 
 wards Nushirv^an, however, with other important persons, 
 looking more deeply into the situation, found it wisest to 
 put the reformer to death. 
 
 But the strongest proof that the ethics of heroism, not 
 the interests of a priesthood, have prescribed the contents 
 of the Shah-Nameh to the very last, and consequently 
 that Firdusi has really refrained in the main from reading 
 into the old traditions of Iran the spirit of a later and very 
 different religion, is found in the figure ^ of the grand 
 vizier of Nushirvan, Buzurjmihr. He is the intellectual 
 and political paragon, who confounds the Mobads on their 
 own ground, and teaches the wisest of kings the arts of 
 government and self-discipline. Finally, by conquering 
 the extremity of injustice with unyielding fortitude, he 
 proves the personal soul greater than kings, and virtue 
 the real master of the world. Even as a youth he inter- 
 prets dreams and asks and answers knotty problems with 
 irresistible authority. His homilies reach the pith of the 
 moral ideal, maintain the rights of reason, and inculcate 
 generous and noble treatment of others as simple justice. 
 It is not easy to find a purer and more humane spirit than 
 
 1 Wholly mythical, says Nijldeke, Tabari, p. 251. 
 
THE shah-nAmeh. ' 779 
 
 that of these sentences. This Oriental Boethius discourses 
 thus : — 
 
 "Keep far from sin; treat all men as thyself; remove alike from 
 thyself and thy enemy all that thou dost not approve. If thou hast 
 rectitude in thy thought, thou wilt do no evil. A bad action is a tree 
 that bears evil fruit. If thou wouldst do no evil, weigh well thy words. 
 Never O Kin^ permit divorce between tliy reason and tliy heart. It 
 is reason that^ives serenity, and delivers from evil in both worlds. 
 But 'tis a poor spirit which says, ' None equals me m knowledge. 
 
 •' Teach your child to write [and what depends on it]. It is the 
 most honorable of arts, and reinstates one who has fallen." 
 
 By this the sage seems to refer to the usefulness of this 
 art in affairs of State ; for he goes on to show how impor- 
 tant it is to the scribe to know how to adapt himself to the 
 feelings of rulers. It is part of his wisdom, of course, to 
 teach^'obedience and devotion to the king. Yet, as events 
 proved, this meant with him the old patriotic loyalty which 
 was part of the heroic ideal, not a tame, passive obedience. 
 We shall see what his philosophy meant by freedom. 
 
 The attachment of Nushirvan to his vizier is shown by 
 seven grand festive conferences, in which the latter stands 
 to be questioned on all subtle problems, and gives oracu- 
 lar replies. Much of this proverbial lore is commonplace 
 enough, but its quality is as good as that of other collec- 
 tions of a similar kind, and was doubtless the storehouse 
 of Persian political idealism for many generations. It has 
 much of the tenderness of Marcus Aurelius, and not a 
 little of the severity of Epictetus : — 
 
 "Two things never die, only two, — words that are sweet, and 
 words that are good: they never grow old. Happy he who has 
 shame [self-respect] and virtue. Do nothing, O King, of which 
 your soul will be ashamed ! Do no evil to men, but help them ; 
 this is the law of religion." 
 
 " Who is the happy man ? He who follows not Ahriman to sin. 
 Who, though mean of rank, is the great man ? He who is most wise 
 and capable of governing his passions. Who is wise ? He who quits 
 
780 ISLAM. 
 
 not the way of God to follow the evil spirit. To have wisdom is to 
 be filled with hope, and to see only good in the world ; to choose the 
 straight, not the crooked way. The servant of God will not turn from 
 the divine commandment to avoid suffering, to gain treasure, or to 
 please any one. For no price will he barter the way of God. Neither 
 serenity nor wisdom goes with evil actions. Is it better to have high 
 birth, or instruction? It is better to have instruction. It is the 
 ornament of the soul. For birth, little can be said. Without merit, 
 it is a sad thing and feeble. Only by discipline is the spirit strong. 
 A right-minded laborer is not contemptible to the wise ; and all riches 
 are loss to men of evil mind. The true friend is he who varies not, 
 who wounds you not, nor fears to suffer for you. What is that which 
 lasts forever? — A benefit. What the most splendid ornament of hu- 
 manity ? — The spirit of the wise, who controls his desires. What is 
 greater than heaven ? — A king with an open hand and a worshipper's 
 heart. What the heaviest thing ? — Sin. What does all mankind con- 
 demn ? — A gross king, who harries the innocent ; a rich man who 
 refuses himself clothes and company ; a shameless woman ; a pre- 
 cipitate man ; a poor man who pretends to be mighty." 
 
 Here is a catechism which might well supplant the dog- 
 matic creeds. 
 
 The loyalty and heroism of this great counsellor was put 
 to the severest test by Nushirvan himself. Even this great 
 king was not proof against the temptations of irresponsi- 
 ble power. Buzurjmihr, suspected of theft, falls into dis- 
 grace; and then, replying with becoming dignity to the 
 charge, that he too had a throne higher than the king's 
 in every respect, is imprisoned in a cave, and no more 
 heard from. Tired of waiting in vain for apologies, 
 Nushirvan sends to know how he bore his punishment, 
 and is answered that his " days are happier than the 
 king's." Further severities bring the same response. 
 Threatened at last with death, the hero replies that for 
 him to leave a painful existence is easy, but it is the king 
 whose heart can be terrified by death. This brings royalty 
 to its senses, and the vizier comes out of his prison a con- 
 queror, to resume his function of interpreting things too 
 
THE SHAH-NAMEH. 781 
 
 dark for kings or Mobads to solve. Here is greatness of 
 another sort than Isfendiyar's or even Rustem's. Yet it be- 
 longs to the evolution of similar qualities of will. And in 
 passing from the oldest to the latest portions of the Iranian 
 epos we have not crossed any important border-line, either 
 ethnic or ethical. 
 
 Nushirv^an himself, who seems to have done more towards 
 collecting the materials for the epos than any other of the 
 Sassanide kings, is enshrined there in a wisdom of his own. 
 Firdusi sings of conversations between the king and his 
 Mobads, in which the latter play the part of disciples, and 
 not of masters. 
 
 On one occasion the Grand Mobad said : " O King, the 
 general-in-chief has raised three hundred thousand dir- 
 hems for us, which we put in thy treasury." Nushirvan 
 replied : " I desire no treasure obtained by inflicting pain. 
 Let it be restored to those from whom he has taken it, 
 and add what they need. Take down his palace and take 
 away his ofiice." 
 
 And here is the Golden Rule of religious freedom : 
 
 "The Mobad said, 'An infidel does not necessarily harm the king. 
 Every intelligent man must know that.' Niishirvan replies : ' I have 
 myself said the same thing, and the believers have heard it from my 
 lips. The world is in no part without religion, though some prefer 
 one faith and some another ; one worships idols, another the true 
 God. But none thinks that evil speaking is better than benediction. 
 The world does not go to ruin for words. Say thou always what thou 
 thinkest in thy heart. Yet if the king himself has not true belief, 
 who shall draw benedictions on the world ? Faith and kingship are 
 soul and body.' " 
 
 "He who-takes care for his reason, O Mobads, cares for his life. 
 All I have learned seems only to pay my debt to my soul and my rea- 
 son. See that reason guards you against your faults, for it is more 
 precious than a crown." 
 
 " Once the Mobads remind him that he has not spoken wise sen- 
 tences for their instruction for a long time. ' I have spoken words 
 enough ,> he replies ; * it is on my actions that I must depend.' " 
 
782 ISLAM. 
 
 He counsels his son not to shed blood lightly, nor lightly 
 go to war, and to render justice alike to great and small. 
 This son, Hormazd, begins by undoing his father's good 
 work, and making way with his ministers. But a letter 
 written by Nushirvan coming to his sight, in which his bad 
 courses are predicted, with their sure penalty, he returns 
 to right ways for a season. Not long afterwards his army, 
 headed by Bahram, whose faithful service has been repaid 
 with insulting suspicion, revolts; and we are introduced 
 to one of those stirring debates of the Iranian chiefs which 
 decided the fate of dynasties. The most striking feature 
 of this debate is the appearance of Bahram's sister, who 
 enters the meeting with the dan of a prophetess, and in an 
 eloquent historical argument protests against her brother's 
 assumption of the throne, as an outrage on the legitimate 
 dynasty. To her replies a prince, who believes that the 
 Kaianides have had their day, a thousand years long, and 
 that their line is practically extinct: "Let their names be 
 pronounced no more. Shame on a king without faith ! " 
 The end is, that Gurdiya distinctly repudiates her brother's 
 cause, while the chiefs almost unanimously drink Avine 
 to the glory of the new aspirant. Hormazd, in virtue of 
 this revolution in the army, is dethroned and deprived of 
 sight. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 The abrupt termination of this chapter, and of the volume, clearly 
 shows that Mr. Johnson had not completed his work at the time of 
 his death. He left no notes of any additional chapter, and probably 
 intended to write no more than a concluding one. His characteristic 
 trait, however, of fully developing his thought in all its bearings war- 
 rants the belief that he would have summed up in a concluding chap- 
 ter not only the substance of this volume, but of the two preceding 
 volumes upon Oriental Religions, as his Introduction in the " India "' 
 was for the whole work (" India," Introduction, p. 33). Still his 
 work is practically complete. The volumes carry in themselves iiis 
 conclusions. This one fully gives by hints and statements his con- 
 cluding thought, — to him the fitting and all-important result of his 
 studies of Oriental Religions, — namely, the connection between the 
 religions of personal Will, which found their culmination in Mahom- 
 etanism, and Universal Religion ; and the natural and necessary 
 evolution, in connection with scientific thought, of the worship of 
 personal Will into the worship of cosmical Substance, Order, and 
 Law. 
 
 A. M. HASKELL, 
 Editor. 
 
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