shall do what he wills; to face some luminous
object while worshipping God.

Then follow several paragraphs which are clearly directed against
Christian missionaries, and more particularly against the doctrine of
vicarious sacrifice and prayer:

'Some deceivers, [the Catechism says,] with the view of
acquiring exaltation in this world, have set themselves up
as prophets, and, going among the labouring and ignorant
people, have persuaded them that, "if you commit sin, I
shall intercede for you, I shall plead for you, I shall save
you," and thus deceive them; but the wise among the people
know the deceit.'

This clearly refers to Christian missionaries, but whether Roman
Catholic or Protestant is difficult to say. The answer given by the
Parsis is curious and significant:

'If any one commit sin,' they reply, 'under the belief that
he shall be saved by somebody, both the deceiver as well as
the deceived shall be damned to the day of Rasta Khez....
There is no saviour. In the other world you shall receive
the return according to your actions.... Your saviour is
your deeds, and God himself. He is the pardoner and the
giver. If you repent your sins and reform, and if the Great
Judge consider you worthy of pardon, or would be merciful to
you, He alone can and will save you.'

It would be a mistake to suppose that the whole doctrine of the Parsis
is contained in the short Guzerati Catechism, translated by Mr.
Dadabhai Naoroji, still less in the fragmentary extracts here given.
Their sacred writings, the Ya_s_na, Vispered, and Vendidad, the
productions of much earlier ages, contain many ideas, both religious
and mythological, which belong to the past, to the childhood of our
race, and which no educated Parsi could honestly profess to believe in
now. This difficulty of reconciling the more enlightened faith of the
present generation with the mythological phraseology of their old
sacred writings is solved by the Parsis in a very simple manner. They
do not, like Roman Catholics, prohibit the reading of the Zend-Avesta;
nor do they, like Protestants, encourage a critical study of their
sacred texts. They simply ignore the originals of their sacred
writings. They repeat them in their prayers without attempting to
understand them, and they acknowledge the insufficiency of every
translation of the Zend-Avesta that has yet been made, either in