gious ablutions because these desecrated the water, and which for the same reason, deposed a king, who, in the simple faith that water was made for man and not man for water, had erected a bath, was too much for laity. Among men and women who, having their work to do, had no time to guard against dropping a hair upon the ground, and to hold funeral services over the parings of their nails, Mazdeism stood self-condemned when made compulsory. Mazdean ritual was fatal to Mazdean doctrine. Buddhism, and Christianity, and Manichean heresy, made alarming progress. In the year 642 the Mohammedans conquered the Persian empire, and Islam became the established religion. In a century its truth, its simplicity, and its likeness to the best features of Mazdeism, gained a large majority of the Persians. In our day a very ignorant few in Iran still burn the Bahram fire and offer the homa; but Bombay and Surat contain nearly all, about 100,000 in number. There they refuse to admit into the body any one not of pure Parsee blood. Leaving religious formality very much to the priests, they distinguish themselves by very good morality, believing that there is one God and no devil, but that out of the heart proceed evil thoughts. They are diligent in business and very successful therein: trying in the spirit of their prophet to make life happy for themselves and for their brethren, with one result that no Parsee is a beggar.*

* Although what I have described was the ordinary faith-the effective religion of the Mazdeans—we cannot suppose that Mazdeans, more than Christians or the professors of any other religion, were entirely at one in their thoughts upon what eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard. We have knowledge from early times of some who shrank from leaving the universe at the mercy of two contending rivals, and who sought a higher unity. This they found in boundless Time. His visible embodiment was the sky, whose movements, superior to both Ormuzd and Ahriman, bring day and night, summer and winter, growth and decay, life and death, joy and sorrow. This regard to time or fate, a return to the now lifeless original Aryan Asura

The Parsee scripture is the Avesta. In the year 325 of our era, while the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and the Christian bishops in council assembled at Nice were laying down the creed of Christendom, the Shah of Persia, Shahpur II., fixed by decree the authorised text of the Avesta or Law, which we now have, differing little, probably, so far as it goes, from the scriptures known to Darius. It is only a fragment, however, a small book, written not in ancient Persian, but apparently in a dialect of Media, the native land of the Magi. When it was discovered to the learned of Europe in the middle of last century, its uncommon stupidity led half of its critics to pronounce it a very recent forgery. Its oldest morsels are the most spiritual; the newer parts view religion through the eyes of priests, scribes, and Pharisees. No great ancient religion has left so poor a record.

Among Aryans the Parsees are what the Jews are among Shemites, exiles from their own land, yet clinging firmly to the faith of their fathers. Some, however, are trying to open their religion to all the life and breath and light which are stirring the world; to bring back religion to first principles, not insisting on explaining in hard and fast terms or doctrines the divine, which they recognise as infinite, nor upon embodying our aspirations—that is, our worship-in fixed material forms; but guiding man, merely as man, in his efforts after the ideal and perfect, and in his duty of living not for self, but for all.

It cannot have escaped you that in form, and also in

of the shining sky, became the orthodox creed of Iran two centuries before the Mohammedan conquest. Still it smuggles a disguised existence among Persian Moslems, who in thought and speech, in prose and verse, relieve their Islam, or quiet submission of the will of the living personal God, by cursing Time, that beldame decrepit with age but undying; and the sky, the vault, the revolving wheel, which, after flinging its creatures alive upon this world, crushes them to death.

spirit, Mazdeism is closely allied to the Jewish religion. For this agreement we were prepared by knowing that around the sources of the Euphrates, ere Abraham crossed the river and became a Hebrew, his kindred and the Aryans lived side by side. Many centuries afterwards, when, in altered circumstances, Jews in Babylon met Persians, and regarded them as their masters and best friends, this renewed contact made Judaism conscious of the outer world and conscious of herself; aware of what others had, and of what she herself possessed, but had not well used. Judaism was quickened and enriched. Not formerly devoted to the worship of one God.—sent, say the prophets, into banishment for worshipping many gods, -the Jews returning from Babylon acknowledged, like the Persians, only one. Loftier views of Jehovah's greatness brought more into play angels and archangels, His messengers-and guardian angels, His continual instruments. The Talmud tells us that the names of the archangels came from Babylon, whence the names of some devils also have come. The Asmodeus who, in the book of Tobit, strangles Sara's seven husbands, is Ashma deva—that is, Ahriman under one of his older names. The grotesque humiliation under which he has laboured ever since Le Sage wrote his famous romance, illustrates a tendency of these latter days. Purer views of God's righteousness separated farther, in the Jewish mind, between God and Satan, until this accusing angel came to wear the form and features of Ahriman. A coming Messiah, a personal resurrection, the restoration of all things, were henceforth popular articles in the Jewish creed.

Mohammed, whose very name for religion is a Persian word, El Din, underlies a heavy debt to Jew, Christian, and Parsee.

Mazdeism, small and perishing in body, is everywhere present in spirit. If at death she has little to bequeath, it is because she gave her wealth generally around her while she was alive.

6

WITH

EGYPT.

WITH the exception of Palestine there is no country in the world which men regard with so much interest as Egypt, and even Palestine, to be understood, must be studied in the light of Egyptian history. It would hardly be too much to say that there is not a branch of human knowledge which can be fully mastered by any one who does not first turn his looks towards the Nile. The cradle of all civilisations, the birthplace of all history, this singular country has exercised a marked and often dominant influence over the ages. Within its limited boundaries many of the arts originated and flourished, and here, too, science and philosophy found a primeval home. As we gaze at the ponderous pyramids and temples its ancient inhabitants raised upon its soil, and marvel at the skill which contrived and the mechanical ingenuity which constructed them, we see memorials of a people who as far surpassed others in civilisation and discovery, as their buildings overshadowed, by their vastness, the greatest architectural achievements of men in other lands.

It is to the religion of the ancient inhabitants of this country that our attention is to-day directed. The sub