angels and spirits, which, in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris,
were most luxuriantly developed." Some of the angels are now
"distinguished by names, which the Jews themselves admit to have
borrowed from their heathen rulers;" "their chief is Mithron, or
Metatron, corresponding to the Persian Mithra, the mediator between
eternal light and eternal darkness; he is the embodiment of divine
omnipotence and omnipresence, the guardian of the world, the instructor
of Moses, and the preserver of the law, but also a terrible avenger of
disobedience and wickedness, especially in his capacity of Supreme Judge
of the dead" (Ibid, pp. 287, 288). This is "the angel of the Lord" who
went before the children of Israel, of whom God said "my name is in him"
(see Ex. xxiii. 20-23), and who is identified by many Christian
commentators as the second person in the Trinity. The belief in devils
is the other side of the belief in angels, and "we see, above all, Satan
rise to greater and more perilous eminence both with regard to his power
and the diversity of his functions." "This remarkable advance in
demonology cannot be surprising, if we consider that the Persian system
known as that of Zoroaster, and centering in the dualism of a good and
evil principle, flourished most and attained its fullest development,
just about the time of the Babylonian exile" (Ibid, pp. 292, 293). The
Persian creed supplies us, as Dr. Kalisch has well said, with "the
sources from which the demonology of the Talmud, the Fathers and the
Catholic Church has been derived" (Ibid, p. 318).

The whole ideas of the _judgment of the dead_, the _destruction of the
world by fire_, and the _punishment of the wicked_, are also purely
Pagan. Justin Martyr says truly that as Minos and Rhadamanthus would
punish the wicked, "we say that the same thing will be done, but by the
hand of Christ" ("Apology" 1, chap. viii). "While we say that there will
be a burning up of all, we shall seem to utter the doctrine of the
Stoics; and while we affirm that the souls of the wicked, being endowed
with sensation even after death, are punished, and that those of the
good being delivered from punishment spend a blessed existence, we shall
seem to say the same things as the poets and philosophers" (Ibid, chap.
xx). In the Egyptian creed Osiris is generally the Judge of the dead,
though sometimes Horus is represented in that character; the dead man is
accused before the Judge by Typhon, the e