VIII.
THE MODERN PARSIS.[50]
I.
t is not fair to speak of any religious sect by a name to which its members object. Yet the fashion of speaking of the followers of Zoroaster as Fire-worshippers is so firmly established that it will probably continue long after the last believers in Ormuzd have disappeared from the face of the earth. At the present moment, the number of the Zoroastrians has dwindled down so much that they hardly find a place in the religious statistics of the world. Berghaus in his 'Physical Atlas' gives the following division of the human race according to religion:
| Buddhists | 31.2 per cent. |
| Christians | 30.7 " |
| Mohammedans | 15.7 " |
| Brahmanists | 13.4 " |
| Heathens | 8.7 " |
| Jews | 0.3 " |
He nowhere states the number of the Fire-worshippers, nor does he tell us under what head they are comprised in his general computation. The difficulties of a religious census are very great, particularly when we have to deal with Eastern nations. About two hundred years ago, travellers estimated the Gabars (as they are called in Persia) at eighty thousand families, or about 400,000 souls. At present the Parsis in Western India amount to about 100,000, to which, if we add 5,500 in Yazd and Kirman, we get a total of 105,500. The number of the Jews is commonly estimated at 3,600,000; and if they represent 0.3 per cent of mankind, the Fire-worshippers could not claim at present more than about 0.01 per cent of the whole population of the earth. Yet there were periods in the history of the world when the worship of Ormuzd threatened to rise triumphant on the ruins of the temples of all other gods. If the battles of Marathon and Salamis had been lost, and Greece had succumbed to Persia, the state religion of the empire of Cyrus, which was the worship of Ormuzd, might have become the religion of the whole civilised world. Persia had absorbed the Assyrian and Babylonian empires; the Jews were either in Persian captivity or under Persian sway at home; the sacred monuments of Egypt had been mutilated by the hands of Persian soldiers. The edicts of the great king, the king of kings, were sent to India, to Greece, to Scythia, and to Egypt; and if 'by the grace of Auramazda' Darius had crushed the liberty of Greece, the purer faith of Zoroaster might easily have superseded the Olympian fables. Again, under the Sassanian dynasty (226-651 a.d.) the revived national faith of the Zoroastrians assumed such vigour that Shapur II, like another Diocletian, could aim at the extirpation of the Christian faith. The sufferings of the persecuted Christians in the East were as terrible as they had ever been in the West; nor was it by the weapons of Roman emperors or by the arguments of Christian divines that the fatal blow was dealt to the throne of Cyrus and the altars of Ormuzd. The power of Persia was broken at last by the Arabs; and it is due to them that the religion of Ormuzd, once the terror of the world, is now, and has been for the last thousand years, a mere curiosity in the eyes of the historian.
The sacred writings of the Zoroastrians, commonly called the Zend-Avesta, have for about a century occupied the attention of European scholars, and, thanks to the adventurous devotion of Anquetil Duperron, and the careful researches of Rask, Burnouf, Westergaard, Spiegel, and Haug, we have gradually been enabled to read and interpret what remains of the ancient language of the Persian religion. The problem was not an easy one, and had it not been for the new light which the science of language has shed on the laws of human speech, it would have been as impossible to Burnouf as it was to Hyde, the celebrated Professor of Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, to interpret with grammatical accuracy the ancient remnants of Zoroaster's doctrine. How that problem was solved is well known to all who take an interest in the advancement of modern scholarship. It was as great an achievement as the deciphering of the cuneiform edicts of Darius; and no greater compliment could have been paid to Burnouf and his fellow-labourers than that scholars, without inclination to test their method, and without leisure to follow these indefatigable pioneers through all the intricate paths of their researches, should have pronounced the deciphering of the ancient Zend as well as of the ancient Persian of the Achæmenian period to be impossible, incredible, and next to miraculous.
While the scholars of Europe are thus engaged in disinterring the ancient records of the religion of Zoroaster, it is of interest to learn what has become of that religion in those few settlements where it is still professed by small communities. Though every religion is of real and vital interest in its earliest state only, yet its later development too, with all its misunderstandings, faults, and corruptions, offers many an instructive lesson to the thoughtful student of history. Here is a religion, one of the most ancient of the world, once the state religion of the most powerful empire, driven away from its native soil, deprived of political influence, without even the prestige of a powerful or enlightened priesthood, and yet professed by a handful of exiles—men of wealth, intelligence, and moral worth in Western India—with an unhesitating fervour such as is seldom to be found in larger religious communities. It is well worth the serious consideration of the philosopher and the divine to discover, if possible, the spell by which this apparently effete religion continues to command the attachment of the enlightened Parsis of India, and makes them turn a deaf ear to the allurements of the Brahmanic worship and the earnest appeals of Christian missionaries. We believe that to many of our readers the two pamphlets, lately published by a distinguished member of the Parsi community, Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, Professor of Guzerati at University College, London, will open many problems of a more than passing interest. One is a Paper read before the Liverpool Philomathic Society, 'On the Manners and Customs of the Parsees;' the other is a Lecture delivered before the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, 'On the Parsee Religion.'