to Persian sources, but it was also shown that the idea of
immortality was mainly developed in the Hebrew mind during the close
relations of the Jews with the Persians. Nor was this all. In the
Zend Avesta were found in earlier form sundry myths and legends
which, judging from their frequent appearance in early religions, grow
naturally about the history of the adored teachers of our race. Typical
among these was the Temptation of Zoroaster.

It is a fact very significant and full of promise that the first large,
frank, and explicit revelation regarding this whole subject in
form available for the general thinking public was given to the
English-speaking world by an eminent Christian divine and scholar, the
Rev. Dr. Mills. Having already shown himself by his translations a most
competent authority on the subject, he in 1894 called attention, in a
review widely read, to "the now undoubted and long since suspected
fact that it pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the important
articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through
their literature to the Jews and ourselves." Among these beliefs Dr.
Mills traced out very conclusively many Jewish doctrines regarding
the attributes of God, and all, virtually, regarding the attributes of
Satan.

There, too, he found accounts of the Miraculous Conception, Virgin
Birth, and Temptation of Zoroaster, As to the last, Dr. Mills presented
a series of striking coincidences with our own later account. As to
its main features, he showed that there had been developed among the
Persians, many centuries before the Christian era, the legend of a vain
effort of the arch-demon, one seat of whose power was the summit of
Mount Arezura, to tempt Zoroaster to worship him,--of an argument
between tempter and tempted,--and of Zoroaster's refusal; and the doctor
continued: "No Persian subject in the streets of Jerusalem, soon after
or long after the Return, could have failed to know this striking myth."
Dr. Mills then went on to show that, among the Jews, "the doctrine of
immortality was scarcely mooted before the later Isaiah--that is,
before the captivity--while the Zoroastrian scriptures are one mass of
spiritualism, referring all results to the heavenly or to the infernal
worlds." He concludes by saying that, as regards the Old and New
Testaments, "the humble, and to a certain extent prior, religion of the
Mazda worshippers was useful in giving point and beauty to many lo