quickens and enlarges the experience. But never is the Creed to lord it over the experience or cramp the experience within its limits. With very much that Dr. Hatch urges so passionately here it is possible to sympathize. Ecclesiastical history down to our own day is gloomy with the consequences of subverting the true relations of Creed and experience. When very much that is noblest and best in Christian life and thought finds no place in the Creed, or when the Creed contains elements which are discovered to be no true utterance of experience but intrusion from an alien sphere, the time for revision and reconstruction has plainly come. But at all times, even when the Creed is closest to experience, the Church must never use it as a barrier in the way of progress, but as an aid toward fuller apprehension and appropriation of her inheritance in Christ.

ZOROASTER AND ISRAEL.
No. I.

By REV. J. H. MOULTON, M.A., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. THE names which stand at the head of this short study represent the greatest contributions of the pre-Christian world to the history of religion. Is it possible in any way to trace an historical connection between them? As one of those who have felt the intense fascination of the Iranian prophet, I venture to take up this inevitable question once again-a question which has clamoured for an affirmative answer with me since my first acquaintance with Avestan studies. Just now there is abundant excuse for discussing it, as Professor Cheyne's Bampton Lectures on the Psalter have given renewed currency to the theory that the later Jewish doctrine of the Resurrection was awakened by the influence of Zoroastrianism. In the present paper I shall endeavour to point out some historical considerations for which Prof. Cheyne has, in my opinion, omitted to allow. I say historical, for I do not think that there is any reason why such a theory should trouble the firmest believer in a unique revelation to the Hebrew people, unless through the corollary that the Psalter, as the product of an age in which this foreign influence can be traced, must belong in the mass to post-Exilic times. The discipline of the Chosen People may well have included such a "provoking to jealousy” by a Gentile religion which had grasped so many truths that Israel was too blind to infer from the teaching God had given him. The teaching of Zarathushtra -so let us call him, as he calls himself-was pre-eminently worthy to perform such a service. If God in olden times spoke through the prophets in many portions and in many ways, He assuredly gave no small portion of His truth to him who, long (perhaps) before David's day, was telling men that God the Creator is one all-wise Lord, perfectly holy and infinitely beneficent; that an evil power, God's enemy and man's, causes all the world's suffering; that man must take his part in the struggle against evil, assured after death of a share in the eternal triumph of good, when the devil and all his helpers

NO. V.-VOL. I.-THE THINKER.

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shall be thrust for ever into hell. This system, as its founder1 left it, is as free from unworthy conceptions of God as Judaism itself; and we who believe that all truth is from one Source, wherever found, can only rejoice to find clearer evidence that God "left not Himself without witness." Zoroastrian Magi were privileged in the fulness of time to present the homage of Gentile religion to Him who made all true religion one; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the faith that prepared for Christ should have received some treasures from their store before Christ came.2

ences.

But this is obviously not a question of à priori probability, but of historical proof. Now, if the Jewish Church learned doctrines of the highest importance from the teachers of the Avestan religion, it is clear that at some period of their history, when the latest parts of their Scriptures were yet unwritten, they must have been surrounded by Zoroastrian influWhen was this, and what were the channels through which these influences flowed? Prof. Cheyne answers that the time is from the reign of Cyrus downwards, and that the Persians were the medium through whom the Jews became acquainted with these tenets. But it is not safe to treat this as an axiom needing no proof. There are many serious difficulties in the way of the assumption that Zoroastrianism was the prevailing religion of Persia at the time required. And it is clear that if the earliest and purest part of the Avesta should prove to have been unknown or unintelligible to the Persians, the case for Prof. Cheyne's theory receives a damaging blow. My purpose in this paper is not to make this blow effective. I am not even expressing agreement with its principle. I am only intending to show some of the points which must be settled before the theory can be entertained, and if they can be settled in a sense favourable to it I shall be quite content. Of course the only advantage the Bampton Lecturer can gain here is the proof that Zoroastrian influences may have reached the teachers of the

1 That Zarathushtra is an historical person, living possibly as early as Moses himself, cannot, I think, be doubted, despite the powerful authority of Darmesteter in the Oxford translation of the Avesta (vol. i.). The later parts of the Avesta transform him into a supernatural being, but the "Gâthâs" (i.e., "Hymns"), which language proves to be centuries earlier, picture him as a purely human prophet, carrying on his work with alternations of success and failure, and without the aid of miracle. His name alone is a powerful argument, for no etymology capable of mythical interpretation has the least linguistic probability. The same is true of the names of his family and his friends.

* Since writing this I have seen Mr. Gwilliam's article in THE THINKER for April, and note with some surprise that it is more necessary than I thought to defend the Divine illumination of a Gentile prophet. May I ask Mr. Gwilliam whether Truth can, in his opinion, be anything else than "inspired by the Spirit of Holiness"? The essence of the objection lies, of course, in what I must be pardoned for calling the deplorable narrowness of those who construct " one Catholic and Apostolic Church" by excluding from her shelter all who cannot pronounce their shibboleth. I, too, am sorry to speak of "the Reformed Churches," for with all her divisions the Church is one, but the blame lies with those who deny the maxim, “ubi Christus, ibi Ecclesia." And that Zarathushtra belonged as a forerunner to the Church of Christ can hardly be questioned by any who take the New Testament as their final appeal. Of course the inspiration of the Old Covenant remains absolutely unique whatever inspiration we concede to Zarathushtra.

post-Exilic Jewish Church. That they did so reach them, and that doctrines found in the Psalter require such an explanation, is a very different thing.

The first point which demands attention is the need of demonstration that the languages of the Avesta were spoken in Persia. To bring this out, it will be well to sketch the linguistic position of the various monuments of ancient Iran. We start from the primitive Indo-Iranian language, the sister of Greek, Italic, Germanic, Keltic, and the other branches of the IndoEuropean family. This language is of course reconstructed by comparative science alone, but the task in this case is a very easy one, and when accomplished gives us a very clear picture of the progress attained by this people when it had migrated far away from its primeval home in Europe, and was about to divide into the race that produced the Avesta and the inscriptions of the Achæmenian kings, and that which gave us the Vedic and later Sanskrit literature. The primitive Iranian period can be reconstructed by the same processes, which enable us to determine with considerable certainty the religion of the undivided people, long before the reform of Zarathushtra. The dialects of the Avesta are usually described as those of Eastern Iran, that of the cuneiform inscriptions as Western. But here we are on fiercely debated ground, Darmesteter and others believing that the Avestan is the language of the Magians of Media, a sacerdotal caste living in the midst of a Persian population. To this question, the crucial point for Prof. Cheyne's theory, we must return in another paper. The Avesta itself is divided into two sections, separated by a gap of some centuries, if we may judge by language and contents. The Gâthâs, a small collection of hymns, comprising only two hundred and forty stanzas in all, bear the evidence of their very early date in the close affinity between their language and that of the Rigveda, as well as in their freedom from the abundant corruptions and fables to be found in the later Avesta. This affinity of language, which is as close as that between French and Italian, not only shows that Vedic and Gâthic cannot be separated by a very wide interval from the period of Indo-Iranian unity, but also supplies us with our soundest canon of interpretation. For since any passage of the Gâthâs may be transformed into Vedic Sanskrit by the operation of fixed principles of sound-change, leaving only a few words here and there in which the two languages have diverged, it seems obvious that the ascertained meaning of this equivalent Sanskrit must have a decisive weight in our examination of the hymns of Zarathushtra. But the Pahlavi doctors who originated the traditional exegesis of the Avesta certainly knew no Sanskrit for such a purpose, and the Gâthic dialect was certainly a dead language long before their time. This has a very important bearing on Prof. Cheyne's contention that we may study the Avesta in a European form without losing anything essential. The later Avesta is fairly safe, as easier in itself and nearer the time of the interpreters; but in the Gâthâs the differences between the two schools of translators—one depending on the evidence of Vedic, the other on the Pahlavi tradition, and answering thus to

the comparative and the Rabbinical schools of Hebrew exegesis—are often very serious. Now, the only continuous translations of the whole Avesta belong to the traditional school, either wholly, or with a very marked bias even while using the other method, so that students unversed in the original language can only gather the results of the other school by laboriously collecting scraps from German periodicals. Prof. Cheyne has used the work of some of these scholars, especially Hübschmann and Geldner, but the Zend publications of the former are not extensive, and the latter, despite his unique services to Avestan scholarship, is not always strict enough in his application of the comparative method. I notice no mention of the most representative writer of this school, Bartholomae, whose much-desired translation of the Gâthâs will supply a great want. It is of course impossible here to discuss the points at issue between the rival schools, whose methods perhaps should be united to produce an ideal translation.

These considerations will help us to our first caution, that the Gâthâs are too full of difficulties, and too much the battle-ground of contrary interpretations, for us to feel perfect confidence as yet in the doctrines we deduce from them. A good example may be quoted in reference to a very important point in eschatology. The later Parseeism conceived a place midway between the "House of Song" and the "House of the Lie," whither men went after death when their good and evil deeds were equal. There is one stanza in the Gâthâs which seems to countenance the assumption that some special treatment was reserved for these ambiguous cases, and it is so taken by the Pahlavi, and by Roth, the greatest scholar of the comparative exegesis. Yet here the translation is exceedingly doubtful, and unless the text is boldly emended (with Bartholomae) it is hard to resist the claims of Mills's version, which ejects this conception altogether. So we have a doctrine of the utmost importance which may have owed its origin solely to an ancient misunderstanding of one stanza in these supremely difficult hymns; nor is the example a solitary one.

So much, then, for the linguistic position of the Gâthâs, which must be assigned without hesitation to the second millennium B.C. Their sober and truthful tone makes it unreasonable to attribute their authorship to any but Zarathushtra himself and his immediate followers; and the doctrines of Zoroastrianism proper must certainly be gathered from this source alone. For we find that even before the Gâthic dialect had ceased to be a possible medium for composition, the successors of the prophet had practically readmitted much of the old polytheism which he had expelled. The existence of the "Gâthâ of seven chapters," written in a dialect like that of the older hymns, but full of the ideas of later times, is a powerful argument for the wide separation in time-and, quite conceivably, in place also-between the relics of Zarathushtra and the bulk of the Parsee Scriptures.

A few words should be added about the Western Iranian, the "Old Persian" language of the cuneiform inscriptions, ancestress of the Pahlavi

(partially) and of the modern Persian. It is important to remember that this dialect, deciphered for us by the brilliant labours of Grotefend, Burnouf, Rawlinson, and their successors, is sister, not daughter, to the Avestan. There is one point mentioned in the Lectures (p. 435) in which the inexperienced reader should have been reminded of this fact, being otherwise very likely to draw an impossible inference from Dr. West's cited argument as to the history of the name Ahura Mazdáh. The name might, of course, have been imported into Persia, and this is what Dr. West believes. But it seems far more probable that we have here an inheritance from the period of Iranian unity. The raw material certainly existed in the earlier stage of Indo-Iranian, for Asura, "a deity," and (su-) -medhas, "wise," are Vedic words. And it is hard to believe that the title of Deity should have been brought into Persia by Zoroastrian teaching, while all the other most characteristic features of that creed make no appearance at all. Indeed, the Gâthas themselves decidedly imply that Zarathushtra is preaching no new God, but bringing a new message from the God of their fathers. One further inference I must mention from the linguistic relations of Old Persian and Zend. Nearly allied though these languages are, they certainly cannot have been mutually intelligible, except in the coincidences of stray words. This implies that the Avesta must have been introduced to the Persians by indirect means; and the difficulty of tracing the ideas of the Gâthâs in the atmosphere of Persian religion practically comes to this: Given certain hymns, originally most obscure, and composed in a dialect already obsolete; given, also, a body of priests revering these hymns (at distance) as inspired, and chanting them in a liturgy which did not require to be "understanded of the people"; what proportion of their sublime thoughts was likely to reach. Jewish psalmists, after percolating through successive strata of Persian and later Avestan interposed between the Hebrew and the original Gâthic?

So much for the difficulty of the confusion of tongues. There follows a corollary. Granted that the Avesta was preached in Persia, what Avesta was it? Evidently the Vendidad, Yashts, and later Yasna,1 to which the Gâthâs, even if they could be construed, were no practical corrective because of their complexity. Now, the doctrine of the Resurrection appears here as certainly as in the Gâthâs: note especially that exquisite fragment which describes the righteous soul met on the way to Paradise by its embodied thoughts, words, and action in the form of a lovely maiden. But the doctrine was not recommended to a Jew by its surroundings. The myths of IndoIranian nature-worship make the monotheism of Zarathushtra an empty form; they can scarcely have been explained into conformity as they are to-day. And the religion as a whole was a repulsive ceremonialism, which

1 These divisions of the Avesta should perhaps be annotated. The Vendidad is the Levitical code; the Yasna is ritual; the Yashts are hymns to the Yasatas, or Nature Powers. Some parts of this literature may not have been composed in Darius's day. But the system was indisputably complete during the "second Persian century," to which Professor Cheyne refers the working of Zoroastrian ideas on the Jews. Moreover, the ceremonial and the polytheism belong to much earlier times than the latest parts of the Avesta.