NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 727 



gards the Old and New Testaments, " the humble, and to a certain 

 extent prior, religion of the Mazda worshipers was useful in giv- 

 ing point and beauty to many loose conceptions among the Jew- 

 ish religious teachers, and in introducing many ideas which were 

 entirely new, while, as to the doctrines of immortality and res- 

 urrection the most important of all it positively determined 

 belief." * 



Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific 

 criticism applied to the sacred literature of southern and eastern 

 Asia. The resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives and 

 ideas in our own sacred books with those of Buddhism were espe- 

 cially suggestive. 



Here, too, had been a long preparatory history. The discov- 

 eries in Sanskrit philology made in the latter half of the eight- 

 eenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, by Sir William 

 Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, and others, had met at 

 first with some opposition from theologians. The declaration by 

 Dugald Stewart that the discovery of Sanskrit was fraudulent, 

 and its vocabulary and grammar patched together out of Greek 

 and Latin, showed the feeling of the older race of biblical stu- 

 dents. But researches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, 

 Whitney, Max Miiller, and others continued the work during the 

 nineteenth century. More and more evident became the sources 

 from which many ideas and narratives in our own sacred books 

 had been developed. Studies in the sacred books of Brahminism, 

 and in the institutions of Buddhism, the most widespread of all 

 religions, its devotees outnumbering those of all branches of the 

 Christian Church together, proved especially fruitful in facts re- 

 lating to general sacred literature and early European religious 

 ideas. 



* For the passages in the Vendidad of special importance as regards the Temptation 

 Myth, see Fargard, xix, 18, 20, 26, also 140, 147. Very striking is the account of the 

 Temptation in the Pelhavi version of the Vendidad. The devil is represented as saying to 

 Zaratusht (Zoroaster), " I had the worship of thy ancestors, do thou also worship me." I 

 am indebted to Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of 

 Munich, for a translation of the original text from Spiegel's edition. For a good account, 

 see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, Lon- 

 don, 1884, pp. 252 et seq. See also Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred Books of the 

 East. For Dr. Mills's article referred to, see his Zoroaster and the Bible, in The Nine- 

 teenth Century, January, 1894. For the citation from Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple 

 Israel, tome xiv, chap iv ; see also, for Persian ideas of heaven, hell, and resurrection, 

 Haug, as above, pp. 310 et seq. For an interesting resume of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, 

 A Modern Zoroastrian, chap, xiii, London, eighth edition, 1893. For the Buddhist version 

 of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausboll, Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys 

 Davids, London, 1880, vol. i, p. 14, and following. For very full statements regarding the 

 influence of Persian ideas upon the Jews during the captivity, see Kohut, Ueber die 

 jiidiseke Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihren Abhangigkeit von Parsismus, Leipsic, 1866. 



