us
simply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception to
which we have recourse is evidently a mere conceit of imagination,
without scientific basis or philosophical confirmation.

The doctrine of a bodily resurrection, resting on a wholly
different ground, again emerges upon our attention in the
Zoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to be
pure and happy and to pass to a heavenly immortality. The evil
Ahriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primal
destiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their material
frames to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to a
painful abode in hell. Meanwhile, the war between the Light God
and the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good One
shall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evil
deeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed at
first be restored. Then all

3 Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 13. Sonntag, De Palingenesia
Stoicorum.

4 Ritter's Hist. of An. Phil., lib. xi. cap. 4.

souls shall be redeemed from hell and their bodies be rebuilt from
their scattered atoms and clothed upon them again.5 This
resurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, nor
is it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzd
of the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred and
defeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is still
understood and looked for by the Parsees.

The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with which
it is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitous
assumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. The
hypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battle
between two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neither
the scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic of
reason; and it has long since been driven from the arena of
earnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violent
curse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform and
spoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now,
as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, a
punishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system." It is
unreasonable to suppose that the Infinite God would deliberately
lay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. And
it is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or an
after result fois