THE ZOROASTRIAN CONCEPTION OF A FUTURE LIFE. 241 



insistent that the " followers of the Lie" shall be to all time 

 dwellers in the " House of the Lie," tormented there eternally. 

 It is hardly likely that it ever occurred to him to be tender 

 towards those who not only refused his gospel, but savagely 

 persecuted his converts. For him God is liighteousness and 

 Truth, but His Fatherhood, hating nothing that He has made, 

 lay below this great prophet's horizon. He was accordingly 

 less perplexed than we with the problem of retribution : the 

 enemies of humanity had earned their doom, and he can even 

 take fierce delight in the contemplation of it. If later Parsee 

 thought, under the impulse of Magian systematising, figured 

 the Molten Metal as destroying hell, it was not tenderness 

 towards Ahriman and his followers, but only a logical develop- 

 ment of the requirement that the victory of Ormazd must be 

 complete. The eschatology of the Pahlavi texts* is frankly 

 universalist, except for the very worst sinners, who have turned 

 themselves into demons and share the fate of Ahriman and 

 his hosts. All this seems to be without warrant in the Gathas 

 and is best interpreted as the outcome of Magian ideas. 



AVe return to the Gathas to notice another conspicuous 

 feature in the imagery of judgment. This is the " Bridge of the 

 Separater," over which the dead have to pass. Originating 

 probably in a primitive conception of the Milky Way as the 

 path of souls, the idea was developed mythically ; and Zara- 

 thushtra found it in possession as a bridge which shrank to a 

 knife-edge width when the wicked essayed to cross, and 

 expanded to a broad highway for the righteous. In this form 

 it survived through later mythology, and was borrowed by 

 Islam as Al-Sirat's Arch. It spanned the abyss, into which the 

 wicked fell. But we may be certain Zarathushtra never meant 

 it to be a real test. The " Separater," whose office was closely 

 attached to it, was a judge of conduct. Later doctrine probably 

 kept up the spirit of the Founder's idea when it pictured the 

 righteous judges of souls occupied in weighing the merits and 

 demerits of each soul before it traversed the Bridge, which thus 

 becomes superfluous except as a picturesque and impressive 

 emblem. It is at the Bridge that the remorse of the sinner is 

 to come to a climax ; but that is clearly because he stepped 

 upon it as a newly-doomed man. Zarathushtra gives us no 

 account of the actual happenings at the Bridge, nor does he 

 stay to describe it. That may be simply because it was a 



* See it presented in Dhalla Zoroastrian Theology ; pp. 291 ff. 



R 



