o the dog, the guardian of the
home and flock, the hunter and the scavenger. It includes an elaborate
code of ceremonial purification, resembling on this point the Leviticus
of the Bible, and it prescribes also the gradations of penance for sins
of various degrees of heinousness.

E.W.

DISCOVERY OF THE ZEND-AVESTA

The "Zend-Avesta" is the sacred book of the Parsis; that is to say, of
the few remaining followers of that religion which reigned over Persia
at the time when the second successor of Mohammed overthrew the
Sassanian dynasty (A.D. 642), and which has been called Dualism, or
Mazdeism, or Magism, or Zoroastrianism, or Fire-worship, according as
its main tenet, or its supreme God, or its priests, or its supposed
founder, or its apparent object of worship has been most kept in view.
In less than a century after their defeat, most of the conquered people
were brought over to the faith of their new rulers, either by force, or
policy, or the attractive power of a simpler form of creed. But many of
those who clung to the faith of their fathers, went and sought abroad
for a new home, where they might freely worship their old gods, say
their old prayers, and perform their old rites. That home they found at
last among the tolerant Hindoos, on the western coast of India and in
the peninsula of Guzerat. There they throve and there they live still,
while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning
and dwindling away.[9]

As the Parsis are the ruins of a people, so are their sacred books the
ruins of a religion. There has been no other great belief in the world
that ever left such poor and meagre monuments of its past splendor. Yet
great is the value which that small book, the "Avesta," and the belief
of that scanty people, the Parsis, have in the eyes of the historian and
theologian, as they present to us the last reflex of the ideas which
prevailed in Iran during the five centuries which preceded and the seven
which followed the birth of Christ, a period which gave to the world the
Gospels, the Talmud, and the Qur'an. Persia, it is known, had much
influence on each of the movements which produced, or proceeded from,
those three books; she lent much to the first heresiarchs, much to the
Rabbis, much to Mohammed. By help of the Parsi religion and the
"Avesta," we are enabled to go back to the very heart of that most
momentous period in the history of religious thought, which saw the
blending o