ery fully charged with meaning and with sentiment.
Uncouth and inartistic in expression, and demanding an immense amount
of patience and ingenuity to trace their connection of thought, they
surprise the reader when once he seizes their meaning, by the depth
and spirituality of their contents, and force him to acknowledge that
they are a worthy document of the birth of a great religion.

The Call of Zarathustra.--The hymns give a vivid picture of that
early world in which the prophet lived. It was a world distracted
with conflict. On one side there is an agricultural community bent on
industry, and, like the Hindus, even at this day, valuing as most
sacred the cattle which form their chief substance. On the other
hand, there are men who dwell on the outskirts between the tilled
land and the wilderness, who are constantly making raids on the
farms, driving off and killing the cattle for sacrifice and for food,
and ruining the fields by destroying the irrigating works on which
their fertility depends. And there is a religious difference as well
as a difference in culture between these two sets of people. The
agriculturists are worshippers of Ahura; the contemners of the cattle
worship beings called in the Gathas "daevas." This schism was not of
Zarathustra's making, he found it going on, and being a priest was
entitled to come forward and seek to guide others with regard to it.
Such is the situation which the hymns present to us. We will try to
state the substance of some of those hymns. The naked words of them,
even when we are sure of the correctness of the translation, are
barely intelligible without lengthy commentary; and on the other
hand, no short statement in modern terms can convey the force and
solemnity of these struggling utterances. As we are dealing with the
original revelation of Zarathustra, the source of the Persian
religion, we shall give the story with some degree of detail.

The first hymn in the arrangement presented to us in _S. B. E._ deals
with what we may term the call of Zarathustra. It sums up in a poetic
and dramatic form the religious result of the movement which led him
to come forward.

The "Soul of the Kine" first speaks; it is the impersonation of the
agricultural community, to whom their cattle are most sacred. She
raises a complaint to Ahura and Asha (the righteousness which is an
attribute of Ahura, and like his other attributes often appears as an
independent person) of the insolence