236 REV. PROF. JAMES HOPE MOULTON, D.LIT V D.C.L., ETC., ON 



system, and made much of every suggestion that carried 

 possibilities of higher use. The recognition of this does not 

 alter the claim of our great prophet to have been the creator of 

 a majestic and highly ethical system whereby a future world 

 should redress the uneven balance of the present world. I will 

 reserve for a while my comments on the amazing fact that a 

 Gentile prophet of so early a date should have soared so high 

 into the mysteries and seen Truth so clearly. 



I have said that Zarathushtra used traditional mythology. 

 Not a few elements in the machinery of his doctrine of the 

 Hereafter can be recognised as inherited myth, partly by 

 parallels known from kindred systems, and partly by the patent 

 fact that they are picturesque excrescences upon the system, 

 never logically worked out, and only retained so far as they can 

 be used to illustrate and enforce ideas wholly independent of 

 them. The eschatology which Zarathushtra inherited was 

 almost entirely mythical in its basis. The religion of the 

 Aryans — I use the word in its strict sense, of the tribes which 

 divided into Iranians and Sanskrit-speaking Indians — was 

 mostly a worship of nature powers ; and its Hereafter was built 

 up of myths in which the daily miracle of the new-risen Daystar 

 played a large part. Zarathushtra's basis was wholly ethical. 

 The Problem of Evil was central in all his thought: it was 

 forced upon him by personal experience, during his sufferings 

 at the hands of brutal nomads who raided the cattle and took 

 the lives of his peaceful agriculturists. His was the problem of 

 the 73rd Psalm, the problem with which all Europe is wrestling 

 in these days of war : Why is brute force allowed so often to 

 triumph over justice ? Why is " Eight for ever on the scaffold, 

 Wrong for ever on the throne " ? Those who fairly face that 

 question must either sacrifice Theism — to which a good and a just 

 God is essential — or take refuge in a Theodicy. Zarathushtra 

 believed so firmly and passionately in God that he caught the 

 vision of a world " in which clwelleth Eighteousness," enthroned 

 for evermore. 



To understand Zarathushtra's Hereafter, therefore, we must 

 understand his doctrine of Good and Evil. His name for God, 

 which had been most naturally assumed to be of his own coining 

 — it is remarkably characteristic of him — has now been proved 

 centuries older than his time. Aliura, " Lord," the Yedic Asura, 

 was still in the Gathas the title of spiritual beings, abstractions 

 who are really part of the hypostasis of God. To this was added 

 the attribute Mazddh, "Wise" ; and in Western Iran, upon the 

 old Persian inscriptions of Darius and his successors, the com- 



