[305] The way in which such a conception acts upon the moral life is well illustrated in the history of English Puritanism. The ethical strenuousness of the Puritan was the outcome of his deeply felt consciousness of the ineradicable antagonism between good and evil. It is all brought vividly before us in Bunyan’s Holy War, in the struggle between Immanuel and Diabolus—of which the myth of Ahura and Ahriman was the prototype.
[306] Mihir Yasht (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii), vii. 26.
[307] See Jackson, Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran.
[308] See above, p. 115.
[309] Zoroastrian ethics, as Wedgwood says, is best understood when viewed as a protest against the Hindu conception of the universe and life. “The injunction to industry, the elaborate provisions for agriculture, the constant stimulus to exertion of every kind, are most intelligible when we see in them a recoil from the faith which appeared to this active race [the Iranian] a confusion of good and evil” (The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 59).
[310] Vendîdâd (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. iv), Farg. iv. 47.
[311] Ibid. Farg. iii. 33.
[312] Ibid. Farg. iv. 49.
[313] “Aryan morality came down from the heavens in a ray of light” (Selected Essays of James Darmesteter, ed. Morris Jastrow, p. 304).
[314] Vendîdâd, Farg. ii. 29.