THE ZOJROASTBIAK CONCEPTION OP A FUTURE LIFE. 



247 



tells us that the Christian Church is the heir of all the ages.* 

 But more than twenty years' study of early Zoroastrianism has 

 for me reduced near the vanishing point any possibility that the 

 -lews in the Captivity could have come in contact with the 

 pure teaching of Zarathushtra, which alone was lofty enough to 

 contribute anything to Israel's spiritual riches. In Babylon 

 and Media they could meet with Magi who appealed to Zara- 

 thushtra's name. But I cannot find that in that age the real 

 teaching of the Gathas was well enough understood to stand 

 out above the kind of doctrine which the priests- taught. 

 Archaic in language, extremely difficult and ambiguous even to 

 modern scientific research, the Gathas were a sealed book, even 

 for the men who faithfully transmitted their words as potent 

 charms against the devil. 



But the comparison of this great thinker's divinely guided 

 intuitions suggests one final reflection. Zarathushtra threw 

 himself upon God's justice, and thence deduced another world 

 as the only answer to the question whether the Judge of all the 

 earth must not do right. Those who came before him had 

 deduced Immortality from God's power, and the analogy of 

 Nature. But even Zarathushtra's was not the highest way ; 

 and all experience tells us that the way is even more important 

 than the end when men set out in quest of Truth. Immortality 

 had yet to be deduced from the Love of God, and the realising 

 of that love was a far more important element in Israel's 

 training than the very hope of heaven could be. So it was that 

 when earthly power and glory had long vanished, and the 

 oppressed people of God could no more even call the land of 

 promise their own, the saints who wrote the later hymns in the 

 Book of Psalms came to realise and teach that God Himself is 

 more than enough to satisfy man's need, and that if He can be 

 addressed by man as " my God," man cannot be left by Him to 

 extinction in the grave.f Hence it is that Zarathushtra's 

 sublime faith is to-day held, and held imperfectly, by a few 

 myriads who will not accept a proselyte, while the faith of 

 Israel prepared the first missionaries of a religion which claims 

 to bring the ultimate truth to the whole world. 



* 1 Cor. x, 11, "unto whom the tribute of the ages has come as our 

 inheritance." (So I translate, on the lexical evidence of papyri and 

 inscriptions of later Greek.) 



t May I refer to my Fernley Lecture, Religions and Religion (London 

 1913), pp. 75-79, for an expansion of this argument 1 



