66 THE TKUE POSITION OF THE HEBREWS 



into his mouth. It was intensely ethical and 

 religious. 



When Zarathustra lived it is difficult to tell. Some 

 say that he reformed the old Persian religion about 

 1,000 b.c, but the modern authorities generally place 

 him in the sixth century. In any case, the reformed 

 Persian religion, as we have it in the Avesta, recog- 

 nized two ultimate principles : a principle of evil, 

 ugliness, and darkness, with legions of devils under 

 him, and a principle of good, light, truth, and beauty, 

 with a corresponding retinue of what moderns would 

 call saints and angels. It was the most remarkable 

 attempt in the old world to tackle the problem of 

 good and evil. But the good principle alone was 

 infinite, and in the end of time it would annihilate 

 the powers of evil and wind up the human drama. 

 The earth would pass away in fire. All men would 

 be summoned before God for judgment, and the good 

 would be selected for eternal happiness in " the 

 kingdom of God." Every sainoly Persian longed for 

 the coming of this " kingdom," to put an enM to the 

 triumph of evil, and prepared himself by ascetic self- 

 denial (especially in regard to sex) to appear before 

 God. The code of conduct was intensely ethical, and 

 especially strong on purity. 



It is unnecessary to point out how this became a 

 permanent element of culture. Babylonia, like Greece 

 and Rome afterwards, and presumably Crete in its 

 time, believed in a future life, but laid little stress on 

 it, as the future was an underworld of unattractive 

 haziness and uncertainty. Egypt vividly recognized 

 the future life, and invented the idea of a personal 

 moral judgment of the soul after death. Now Persia 

 added a doctrine of an approaching destruction of the 



