CHAPTER VII.
The Medo-Persians and Parsees. Artfulness of theologians. They systematically break the ninth commandment. Frauds in orthodoxy. A man may use false weights innocently, but is punished, nevertheless. In theology ignorance does not justify deceit. Case in trade. Professional blindness. A law for punishing adulteration of truth is wanted. Mosaism and Zoroaster. Parsees and Christians. Moses and Zoroaster. The ancient magi. The Persians. Conflicting ideas of God in Bible. The source of the Biblical theology. Cyrus. Inquiry into the authenticity of the Avesta. The book condemned. Account of the Medo-Persian faith from Herodotus. Period of introduction of the Devil to the Bible. Summary. Comparison and contrast. Introduction to next chapter.
In every ancient, and, indeed, in every modern, faith which I have yet examined, I have been shocked with the manner in which it has been represented by interested opponents. Whether they are Romanists or Protestants, Evangelicals or Ritualists, Orthodox or Non-conformists, all our divines endeavour to prove their own tenets to be the best, by blazoning everything which is good, and veiling from sight everything which is doubtful. This being so, it is not at all surprising that Christians generally should try to exalt the religion professed by themselves over that propounded by others, whom they designate "heathens." But though it is not strange that very human partisans should act thus, it is marvellous to find that all the ardent disciples of Jesus, without an exception, that I know of, should, in their dealings with mankind, systematically break the ninth of those commandments which they assert were given by God to man, upon Mount Sinai All of them bear false witness against their neighbour, and give incorrect accounts of themselves in addition. They resemble, indeed, those Dutch merchants whom Washington Irving describes, so pleasantly, in his history of New York, who had two sets of weights, a heavy lot by which to purchase, and a light set by which to sell Such traders we call "fraudulent;" and I assert that every so-called orthodox polemic whose books I have read deserves the same epithet. Their fraud is shown by the misrepresentations that they make, both of the creed which they uphold and the one which they oppose. The heterodox and the so-called atheist may be trusted, at least, to tell the truth.
In saying this, I do not assert that everyone gives false witness knowingly, any more than I would blame a tradesman for using false scales, or weights, if he could demonstrate that he had purchased them as true, and could show that he had never tampered with them. Yet the law would punish such a man for their use, arguing that he ought to have made inquiry. In one of the large towns of Great Britain, on one occasion, a merchant, believed to be both religious and honest, sold to a broker a cargo of stuff which had no existence, and, when the delivery had to be made, the first destroyed himself, and the second was adjudged to be a culpable bankrupt, because he had taken the existence of the oil for granted, without investigation. Just so it is with ordinary divines; they assume certain statements in their own religious book to be true—they are taught to shut their eyes to the absurdities in the same volume, and to explain away, in one manner or another, everything which militates against common sense. By this plan they contrive to sell, as sterling stuff, something which is made of base material, without knowingly being parties to a fraud. In the same way a shopman may, on the word of the manufacturer, dispose of a piece of goods as wholly silk, although he has a shrewd presumption that the fabric contains a large proportion of cotton. For such individuals we have the proverb, "there are none so blind as those who will not see." But these very theologians of whom we are speaking, when they are dealing with the sacred books, ordinary customs, ritual, and the like, of other people, having a different religion to their own, are exact, in the extreme—every absurdity is exhibited ruthlessly; every legend is ridiculed; every discrepancy is magnified; and everything which betrays ignorance, or want of scientific knowledge, is paraded with inglorious ceremony. On the other hand, everything good which is to be found therein is, if possible, suppressed. A book, which was, for a long time, a standard one amongst our divines, entitled, Christ and Many Masters, is particularly open to this charge. In it there is throughout a suppressio veri, a suggestio falsi, and scarcely a page that does not bear false witness. If there were a law to punish those who adulterate or falsify "truth," our magistrates would be kept extremely busy.
As an inquiry into the realities of Buddhism has led us to the belief that the origin of Christianity may be found in the doctrines of the son of Maya, which were adopted with certain Judaic modifications by the sons of Elizabeth and Mary—so it is highly probable that what is called Mosaism has been built upon the teachings of the Persian or Median theology, said to have been founded by Zoroaster. Perhaps it would be difficult to find any modern evidence of the likelihood of this hypothesis more powerful than the fact that at the present day the Jews and the Parsees fraternize almost like brothers. The latter in England, and, I understand, elsewhere, select, when they can, the house of a Hebrew wherein to lodge, rather than that of any man of another nation. To this testimony, such as it is, we must add another which is very telling, viz., that almost every modern orthodox writer who has treated of Zoroaster, has declared that the prophet of Persia drew his inspiration from the lawgiver of Israel The priority of the latter being asserted, and the second place having been given to the former, the matter was supposed to be proved, and the Persian, after having been regarded as a copy of the Hebrew, was consigned to oblivion.
There can be little doubt, however, that the teachings of Zoroaster had more life in them than those either of the Jew or the Christian, for the Parsee always and even to the present day, and in every position of life, may lay claim to the title of nature's gentleman, which very few of the disciples of Jesus or of Moses could pretend to until very recently. The morality of these religionists is excellent. In every relation of life they endeavour to be, to do, and to think that which is right—and though there may be black sheep amongst them, the proportion of these to the main body is small In no period of their history, so far as I can learn it, have the Zoroastrians been as brutal as the Christians were so long as they had the power—nor have they ever introduced into their worship figures of men, women, or children with the apparent intention of honouring or adoring them, or the assertion that such things assisted their devotions. Being strictly monotheists, they have not split up the Godhead into three males influenced by a female who is the spouse of one and mother of a second; nor have asserted that the one great Creator is compounded of a father, a son, and a pigeon, with a woman for an intercessor with her celestial consort. Nor do the Parsees build vast temples for the Almighty to dwell in, neither do they reduce any portion of the Omnipotent to the necessity of residing in a bit of bread shut up for many a long day in a box. On the contrary, the modern followers of Zoroaster worship "the father" in spirit and in truth—not with eye service as men-pleasers, but with singleness of heart, fearing God (Col. iii. 22.), thus being, as we are told, the very men whom the Almighty seeketh (John iv. 23, 24).
The first resemblance between the Persian and the Jewish lawgiver to which we would call attention, is the mythical nature of both. The Hebrew who believes in Moses can show no other ground for his faith than a number of books which tell of Moses, his genealogy, his acts, his laws, his character, and his death. Yet when an independent inquirer subjects these books, and the accounts which they contain, to a rigid examination, he finds evidence that the writings are fabrications of a period at least a full thousand years after the era of their supposed epoch—probably more; and that all collateral testimony and all internal evidence drawn from the books themselves disprove the actual existence of Moses. To the scholar, the Hebrew lawgiver is as apocryphal or fictitious a being as Hercules, Romulus, and our own king Arthur. Nor is this belief of the critic shaken when he finds that the history of Moses is interwoven with miraculous legends—credit them he cannot; but he may pause before he determines to see in them evidence of fabrication. He cannot fairly deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, because many marvellous stories were told of him, nor would a similar cause alone lead him to assert that Francis of Assisi was a mythical individual. But whichever way the careful philosophical inquirer may decide the questions at issue, he will remember that many strange stories are told of the conception, birth, and life of Zoroaster, and that the critic must mete out equal justice, both to the Jew and to the Persian. Again, impartial inquirers find themselves unable to determine, with anything approaching to accuracy, either by internal evidence or contemporary remains—the positive epoch when the tale about Moses was originated. It is true that the Bible seems to afford foundation for a chronology in a few parts, as, for example, in the historical books; but these are so completely contradicted by genealogies in other parts that we cannot trust them. After stripping away every doubtful scrap from Jewish history, all we can find is, that Moses was first talked of, familiarly, after what maybe called the Grecian Captivity of Jerusalem (see Obadiah, Ancient Faiths, &c.t Vol. ii.), and that he was said to be the author of the ceremonial, moral, and political laws which were framed for the Jewish nation, and which were assiduously taught to the Hebrews after the Babylonish captivity.
The followers of Zoroaster are equally ignorant of the real history of their prophet, and are equally unable to demonstrate the claim of the Zend Avesta to be a true account of the teaching of the Persian sage, as are the Jews to prove the antiquity of their laws and nation. Putting on one side all those which may be regarded as modern fancies, the first mention made of the Prophet is in the first Alcibiades of Plato, which we may imagine was written shortly after B.c. 412, in which year that distinguished Greek citizen negociated a treaty between Athens and Persia. Plato, when speaking of the education of the sons of the kings of Persia, says (Bohn's edition, Vol. iv., p. 344), "At fourteen years of age, they who are called the royal preceptors, take the boy under their care. Now these are chosen out from those who are deemed most excellent of the Persians, men in the prime of life, four in number, excelling (severally) in wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The first of these instructs the youth in the learning of the Magi, according to Zoroaster, the son of Oromazes—now by this learning is meant the worship of the gods—and likewise in the art of kingly government." But Herodotus, writing about B.c. 450, when giving, in Book i, c. 131, an account of the religion of the Persians, makes not only no mention of Zoroaster, but attributes to that nation a form of worship differing from what is supposed to be pure Zoroastrianism;* but he mentions—and it seems to be a significant fact, that it is not lawful for a Persian to sacrifice unless one of the Magi is present, who sings an ode concerning the original of the gods which, they say, is an incantation.
* There is strong constructive evidence, from the nature of
the Aryan Mythology, from the pages of the Vedas, from the
anthropological resemblances between Persians, Caucasians,
Greeks, Latins, Germans, British, and others; from the
linguistic alliances between what have been called the Indo-
Germanic races; and from a variety of other sources, each
small in itself, but strong in the aggregate, for the belief
that the origin of the Aryan mythology, or the Vedic
religion as it is otherwise called, may be traced to Bactria
or to Ancient Persia. Persia is spoken of by Plato as if her
people carried the dynasties of their kings far back into
eternity. (First Alcibiades, Bohn's edition, vol. iv., p.
343). Herodotus again (Book i., c. 131) tells us that the
Persians from the earliest times have sacrificed to the sun
and moon, to the earth, fire, water, and the winds, that
they sacrifice on high places, have no divine statues, nor
do they build temples. Now this is almost entirely a
description of the old Aryan religion. The sun, for example,
is Surya, Aryama, Mitra, Vivaswat, Martunda, Savitor, Sura,
Ravi, Varuna, Indra Yama, Vishnu, and Krishna (Moor's Hindoo
Paillhcon, p. 287). The moon is Chandra and Soma, and the
origin of these words is to be found in the Persian as well
as in the Sanscrit writings (Moor's H. P., p. 284-5). The
Earth is Prit'hivi, 11a, Lakshmi, and Vasta. Fire is the
powerful Agni. The water is Nara, or Narayana (Moor's JET.
P., 74), from which all things came (see Water in Ancient
Faiths), and the Winds are Maruts and Vaya. To these
deities, individually or collectively, the modern Hindoo
offers prayer and praise; and the hymns of the Rig Veda,
such as we have them edited by Max Muller and Wilson, are
copies probably of the same chants which accompanied the
sacrifices of the Ancient Persians.
This seems to indicate that the Persian religion was then undergoing some supervision by rulers who had a different faith to that held at a later period. When we next turn to Herodotus, Book L, c. 101, we find that the Magi were one of the six tribes which composed the Medes; and we notice that Phraortes, the son of Deioces, reduced the Persian kingdom under the dominion of the Medes about B.c. 650. If, then, we regard Zoroaster as being the founder of the Magi, we must throw back his epoch considerably further than this date. But even if we accept this conquest as the era of the Parsee prophet, we find that Zoroaster preceded the first public promulgation of the Mosaic law amongst the Jews.*