m, in which the candidates had to
pass through a great series of trials and hardships. Persia
influenced Europe and the west of Asia at the same period in another
way. Manicheism, a system which was one of the three great universal
religions of that time, and had a worship and a priesthood and a
sacred literature of its own, was founded by a native of Persia. He
laboured at a distance from his own country, and the doctrines he
propounded came more from Chaldea than from Persia, and consisted of
great histories, like those of the Gnostics, of the doings and
sufferings of cosmic and other persons; a great struggle between the
powers of light and those of darkness was one of its principal
features. The worship of this church was spiritual; its morals were
in theory of the purest and most ascetic kind, being founded on a
principle of dualism in the material world, and requiring much
self-denial and long fasts. The higher virtue of the system was not,
however, required of the ordinary member. Later Parsism, both in Iran
and in India, has shown a disposition to cast off dualism, and to
become, both philosophically and practically, a monistic system.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_S. B. E._ vols. iv., xxiii. (Darmesteter); xxxi. (Mills). _The
Zendavesta_, vols. v., xviii., xxiv., xxxvii., xlvii. Pahlavi Texts
(E. W. West).

_The Histories of Antiquity_ of Duncker, Maspero, and Ed. Meyer.

Haug's _Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the
Parsis_. Second Edition, 1878,

F. Windischmann, _Zoroastr. Studien_, 1863.

Geldner, "Zoroaster," in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_; "Zoroastrianism,"
in _Encyclopaedia Bibl._

Mills, _A Study of the Five Zarathustrian Gathas_, 1892-94.

Lehmann, in De la Saussaye.

Dadhabai Naoroji, _The Parsee Religion_.

On Mithraism, _Dieterich Eine Mithras-liturgie._

Cumont, _The Mysteries of Mithra_, 1903.

PART V
UNIVERSAL RELIGION

CHAPTER XXII
CHRISTIANITY

The writer is aware that in offering a chapter on Christianity at the
conclusion of this work, he attempts a difficult task. If treated at
all, Christianity must be dealt with in the same way as the other
religions, and no assumptions must be made for it which were not made
for them. And a view of our own religion written, not from the
standpoint of the faith and love we feel towards it but of scientific
accuracy, must appear to many pious Christians to be cold and meagre.
But, on the other hand, Christia