MASTERS.[68] The first were the inferior clergy, who
served in all the common offices of their {62} divine worship; next above
them were the superintendents, who in their several districts governed the
inferior clergy, as bishops do with us; and above all was the
perfect-master, the archimagus, who was the head of the whole religion.
Accordingly their places of worship were of three sorts. The lowest sort
were parochial oratories served by the inferior clergy, where they read the
daily offices out of their liturgy, and on solemn occasions read part of
their sacred writings to the people. In these churches there were no fire
altars; but the small scintilla of sacred fire preserved in them, was kept
only in a lamp. Next above these were their fire temples, in which fire was
continually burning on a sacred altar. The highest church of all was "_the
fire-temple_," the residence of the archimagus, first established by
Zoroaster at Balch, but removed in the seventh century to Kerman, a
province in Persia on the southern ocean. To gain the better reputation to
his pretensions, Zoroaster first retired to a cave, and there lived a long
time as a recluse, pretending to be abstracted from all earthly
considerations, and to be given wholly to prayer and divine meditations;
and the more to amuse the people who there resorted to him, he dressed up
his cave with several mystical figures, representing Mithra, and other
mysteries of their religion. In this cave he wrote his book, called
Zendavesta, or Zend, meaning "fire-kindler," or "tinder-box." This book
contains much borrowed {63} from the Old Testament. He even called it the
book of Abraham, and his religion the religion of Abraham; for he pretended
that the reformation which he introduced was no more than to bring back the
religion of the Persians to that original purity in which Abraham practised
it, by purging it of all those defects, abuses, and innovations, which the
corruptions of after-times had introduced into it.[69]

Is it not singular that all the nations of the earth still trace their
teaching in pure religion to Abraham, whether under the name of Brahma, or
otherwise?

These ancient Magi were great mathematicians, philosophers, and divines of
the ages in which they lived, and had no other knowledge but what by their
own study, and the instructions of the ancients of their sect they had
improved themselves in. All of the Magi were not thus learned, only those
of the hi