[7] Yaçna xliii.
[8] ‘Die Christliche Lehre von der Sünde.’ Von Julius Müller, Breslau, 1844, i. 193.
[9] ‘Ormazd brought help to me; by the grace of Ormazd my troops entirely defeated the rebel army and took Sitratachmes, and brought him before me. Then I cut off his nose and his ears, and I scourged him. He was kept chained at my door. All the kingdom beheld him. Afterwards I crucified him at Arbela.’ So says the tablet of Darius Hystaspes. But what could Darius have done ‘by the grace of Ahriman’?
[10] Cf. Rev. v. 6 and xii. 15.
Chapter II.
The Second Best.
Respect for the Devil—Primitive atheism—Idealisation—Birth of new gods—New gods diabolised—Compromise between new gods and old—Foreign deities degraded—Their utilisation.
A lady residing in Hampshire, England, recently said to a friend of the present writer, both being mothers, ‘Do you make your children bow their heads whenever they mention the Devil’s name? I do,’ she added solemnly,—‘I think it’s safer.’
This instance of reverence for the Devil’s name, occurring in a respectable English family, may excite a smile; but if my reader has perused the third and fourth chapters (Part I.) of this work, in which it was necessary to state certain facts and principles which underlie the phenomena of degradation in both Demonology and Devil-lore, he will already know the high significance of nearly all the names which have invested the personifications of evil; and he will not be surprised to find their original sanctity, though lowered, sometimes, surviving in such imaginary forms after the battles in which they were vanquished have passed out of all contemporary interest. If, for example, instead of the Devil, whose name is uttered with respect in the Hampshire household, any theological bogey of our own time were there mentioned, such as ‘Atheist,’ it might hardly receive such considerate treatment.