1861.

'The Parsee Religion,' By Dadabhai Naoroji, Esq. Liverpool, 1861.]

He nowhere states the number of the Fire-worshippers, nor does he tell
us under what head they are comprised in his general computation. The
difficulties of a religious census are very great, particularly when
we have to deal with Eastern nations. About two hundred years ago,
travellers estimated the Gabars (as they are called in Persia) at
eighty thousand families, or about 400,000 souls. At present the
Parsis in Western India amount to about 100,000, to which, if we add
5,500 in Yazd and Kirman, we get a total of 105,500. The number of the
Jews is commonly estimated at 3,600,000; and if they represent 0.3 per
cent of mankind, the Fire-worshippers could not claim at present more
than about 0.01 per cent of the whole population of the earth. Yet
there were periods in the history of the world when the worship of
Ormuzd threatened to rise triumphant on the ruins of the temples of
all other gods. If the battles of Marathon and Salamis had been lost,
and Greece had succumbed to Persia, the state religion of the empire
of Cyrus, which was the worship of Ormuzd, might have become the
religion of the whole civilised world. Persia had absorbed the
Assyrian and Babylonian empires; the Jews were either in Persian
captivity or under Persian sway at home; the sacred monuments of Egypt
had been mutilated by the hands of Persian soldiers. The edicts of the
great king, the king of kings, were sent to India, to Greece, to
Scythia, and to Egypt; and if 'by the grace of Auramazda' Darius had
crushed the liberty of Greece, the purer faith of Zoroaster might
easily have superseded the Olympian fables. Again, under the Sassanian
dynasty (226-651 A.D.) the revived national faith of the Zoroastrians
assumed such vigour that Shapur II, like another Diocletian, could
aim at the extirpation of the Christian faith. The sufferings of the
persecuted Christians in the East were as terrible as they had ever
been in the West; nor was it by the weapons of Roman emperors or by
the arguments of Christian divines that the fatal blow was dealt to
the throne of Cyrus and the altars of Ormuzd. The power of Persia was
broken at last by the Arabs; and it is due to them that the religion
of Ormuzd, once the terror of the world, is now, and has been for the
last thousand years, a mere curiosity in the eyes of the historian.

The sacred writings of the Zoroastrians, commonly called the