od.
Such a picture as that by Retzsch of the Devil playing chess with the
young man for his soul, such a picture as that by Guido of the conflict
between Michael and Satan, such poems as Milton's Paradise Lost and
Goethe's Faust, could perhaps never have appeared in Christendom, had it
not been for the influence of the system of Zoroaster on Jewish, and,
through Jewish, on Christian thought. It was after the return from Babylon
that the Devil and demons, in conflict with man, became a part of the
company of spiritual beings in the Jewish mythology. Angels there were
before, as messengers of God, but devils there were not; for till then an
absolute Providence ruled the world, excluding all interference of
antagonistic powers. Satan, in Job, is an angel of God, not a devil; doing
a low kind of work, indeed, a sort of critical business, fault-finding,
and looking for flaws in the saints, but still an angel, and no devil. But
after the captivity the horizon of the Jewish mind enlarged, and it took
in the conception of God as allowing freedom to man and angels, and so
permitting bad as well as good to have its way. And then came in also the
conception of a future life, and a resurrection for ultimate judgment.
These doctrines have been supposed, with good reason, to have come to the
Jews from the influence of the great system of Zoroaster.

There is no doubt, however, that the Jewish prophets had already prepared
a point of contact and attachment for this system, and developed
affinities therewith, by their great battle-cry to the nation for right
against wrong, and their undying conviction of an ultimate restoration of
all good things. But the Jews found also in the Persian faith the one
among all religions most like their own, in this, that it had no idols,
and no worship but that addressed to the Unseen. Sun and fire were his
symbols, but he himself was hidden behind the glorious veil of being. And
it seems as if the Jews needed this support of finding another nation also
hating idolatry, before they could really rise above their tendency to
backslide into it. "In the mouth of two witnesses," the spiritual worship
of God was established; and not till Zoroaster took the hand of Moses did
the Jews cease to be idolaters. After the return from the captivity that
tendency wholly disappears.

But a deeper and more essential point of agreement is to be found in the
special practical character of the two systems, regarding life a