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The Zoroastrian faith was thus maintained in its purity by the Persian monarch, who did not allow himself to be imposed upon by the specious eloquence of the new teacher, but ultimately rejected the strange amalgamation that was offered to his acceptance. It is scarcely to be regretted that he so determined.
A still greater attempt to blend Christianity with the religions of ancient Asia was made by Mani, a Persian, who especially attempted to fuse Zoroastrian with Christian doctrines. He aimed to produce the utmost estrangement from all mundane influences, since the evil principle held in bondage the elements springing out of the kingdom of light.
The world is holy, the things seen symbolizing the Unseen, and worthy of worship so, the Zoroastrian rites most becoming a nature so fine as ours in this thin newness, this worship being so sensible, so promotive of possible pieties, calling us out of doors and under the firmament, where health and wholesomeness are finely insinuated into our souls, not as idolaters, but as idealists, the seekers of the Unseen through images of the Invisible.
Consider the people and nations of the earth today and observe this same tenacious allegiance to ancestral belief. He whose father was a Zoroastrian is a Zoroastrian. He whose father was a Buddhist remains a Buddhist. The son of a Muslim continues a Muslim, and so on throughout. Why is this? Because they are slaves and captives of mere imitation.
Darius claims to have had the help of "Ormuzd and the other gods that may exist," because he "was not wicked, nor a liar;" and he enjoins it on his successor to "punish severely him who is a liar or a rebel." The Zoroastrian designation of heaven was the "Home of Song;" while hell was known as the "Home of the Lie."
For a vivid portrayal of the last days of this unfortunate scion of the lost empire of the Iranians the reader is referred to the vivid page of this English authority, who has reproduced the story of Zoroastrian aggressions in all its original spirit.
The translations from Hindu, Buddhist, Mohammedan, Confucian, and Zoroastrian literatures, by Max Müller, Rhys Davids, Oldenberg, Fausbôll, Palmer, Darmesteter, Mills, Legge, Buhler, West, Beal, and other able scholars, are invaluable.
Indifferent to the truth that the members of this innocent and proscribed community can justly claim to rank as among the most disinterested, the most competent, and the most ardent lovers of their native land, contemptuous of their high sense of world citizenship which the advocates of an excessive and narrow nationalism can never hope to appreciate, such an authority refuses to grant to a Faith which extends its spiritual jurisdiction over well-nigh six hundred local communities, and which numerically outnumbers the adherents of either the Christian, the Jewish, or the Zoroastrian Faiths in that land, the necessary legal right to enforce its laws, to administer its affairs, to conduct its schools, to celebrate its festivals, to circulate its literature, to solemnize its rites, to erect its edifices, and to safeguard its endowments.
In process of time the priests of the Zoroastrian faith became unduly powerful, and enslaved the people by many superstitions, such as the multiplication of rites and ceremonies and the interpretation of dreams and omens.
If a Hindu sits rapt in devotion to Krishna, the waves of feeling which pour forth from him stimulate devotional feeling in all those who come under their influence, though in the case of the Muhammadan that devotion is to Allah, while for the Zoroastrian it is to Ahuramazda, or for the Christian to Jesus.
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