246 REV. PEOF. JAMES HOPE MOULTON, B.LIT., D.C.L.,, ETC., ON 



birds of prey. Herodotus tells us that here the Magi differed 

 from the Persians, for the latter covered the corpse with wax 

 and buried it. This answers both to the silence and the 

 obscure speech of the Gathas. These have no hint that a corpse 

 polluted the earth. On the contrary we read that Aramaiti, 

 the archangel of Piety, who presides over the earth, " gave con- 

 tinued life of their bodies, and indestructibility."* Earth, then, 

 is so charged with life-giving potency that she will at last give 

 a body to those who sleep in her bosom. There is nothing 

 more to be got out of the Gathas here, but later Parseeism 

 develops very elaborately the stages of the final Eesurrection, 

 when the hitherto disembodied souls will receive new bodies 

 and enter the life of the new world, all except those sinners 

 who have made themselves into veritable fiends. There are 

 many other features of later speculation which would repay 

 mention, but my time has. gone, and I must only deal briefly 

 with one subject of special importance to us. 



It is an obvious consequence of the facts and dates presented 

 that Zarathushtra's was the earliest voice to preach an ethical 

 doctrine of immortality, unless Egypt can make good a counter- 

 claim. It is, moreover, a doctrine to which Christianity itself 

 would not wish to offer any protest. We have much, very 

 much, to add from the teaching of Him who brought life and 

 immortality to light out of the mists of reverent intuition in 

 which even a prophet's apocalypse left the great hope of 

 mankind. But it is a very wonderful thing that one solitary 

 Eastern thinker should have travelled so far at least six, and 

 more probably ten, centuries before the day when all graves 

 were opened by the emptying of one. We rather tend to break 

 out with Joshua's exclamation, when jealous for the sake of 

 Moses. We are so accustomed to think of Israel as on the 

 mountain-top to catch the first rising of every new light in 

 religion, that we can hardly understand how immortality 

 should have been unthought of till the Old Testament canon 

 was nearly closed. Nor is this all. There have been many 

 scholars — not, however, among Zoroastrian specialists, but 

 exclusively, I think, from the camp of Old Testament study — 

 who have urged that contact with Zoroastrianism gave the first 

 impulse to the doctrine in Israel. I have always been attracted 

 by the idea, which gives a new wealth of meaning to the open- 

 in g verses of Hebrews, and to that great phrase in which Paul 



Yasna 30 7 . 



