RELIGIOUS BELIEF AS A BASIS OF MORALITY. 89 



According to Herodotus (i, 136), the Persian king gave prizes 

 to those of his subjects who had the greatest number of children. 

 Vigorous procreation was one of the most effectual means of 

 grace. It is stated in the Sad-dar that "to him who has no child, 

 the Chinvad bridge (leading to paradise) shall be barred. The- 

 first question the angels who guard this narrow passage will ask 

 him is whether he has left in this world a likeness of himself ; if 

 he answers in the negative, they will leave him standing at the 

 head of the bridge, full of sorrow and despair." In the same 

 work that contains this piece of eschatology it is also written : 

 " There are those who strive to pass a day without eating and 

 who abstain from meat ; we, too, have our strivings and abstain- 

 ings, namely, from evil thoughts, and evil words, and evil deeds. 

 Other religions prescribe fasting from bread ; ours enjoins fasting 

 from sin." 



The Brahmans maintained that the man who died without a 

 son went to perdition, because there was no one to pay him the 

 traditional family worship ; hence the necessity of adopting a son 

 in case he had none of his own. The Levitical law, as we have 

 already seen, compelled a man to take the wife of a deceased 

 brother, who died childless, and raise up seed to him. In the 

 Persian Bivayats, or collections of traditions, similar matrimo- 

 nial prescriptions are given. Thus, if a man over fifteen years of 

 age dies childless and unmarried, his relations are to provide a 

 maiden with a dowry and marry her to another man. Half of 

 the children resulting from this union are to belong to the dead 

 man and half of them to his proxy, the actual husband, and she 

 herself is to be the dead man's wife in the next world. This kind 

 of wife is called satar, " adopted." Again, if a widow, who has no 

 children by her first husband, marries again, half of her chil- 

 dren by the second husband are regarded as belonging to the first 

 husband, and she also belongs to him in the future life ; such 

 a wife is called chaJkar, " serving." The first child of an only 

 daughter belongs to her parents, if they have no sons, and they 

 give her one third of their property in compensation. This kind 

 of wife is called yukan, or " only child " wife. (Dr. E. W. West, 

 Pahlavi Texts, in The Sacred Books of the East, vol. v, p. 143.) 

 All these laws and customs show the vital importance attached 

 to the possession of male offspring and to the preservation of an 

 unbroken succession in the line of descent. 



There are strong indications that the transition from pastoral 

 to agricultural life in old Aryan society preceded the transforma- 

 tion of religious conceptions, and that the latter grew up gradu- 

 ally as a means of concentrating and more completely consolidat- 

 ing the former. In the second fargard of the Vendidad a curious 

 account is given of Yima, who lived before Zarathustra and is 



