imposition appears. In view of the whole case,

5 Dabistan, vol. i. p. 226, note.

6 Ibid. p. 185, note.

7 Reviewed in Asiatic Journal, 1844, pp. 582-595.

the reverse supposition is rather to be credited. In the first
place, we have ample evidence for the existence of the general
Zoroastrian system long anterior to the rise of Christianity. The
testimony of the classic authors to say nothing of the known
antiquity of the language in which the system is preserved is
demonstrative on this point. Secondly, the striking agreement in
regard to fundamental doctrines, pervading spirit, and ritual
forms between the accounts in the classics and those in the
Avestan books, and of both these with the later writings and
traditional practice of the Parsees, furnishes powerful
presumption that the religion was a connected development,
possessing the same essential features from the time of its
national establishment. Thirdly, we have unquestionable proofs
that, during the period from the Babylonish captivity to the
advent of Christ, the Jews borrowed and adapted a great deal from
the Persian theology, but no proof that the Persians took any
thing from the Jewish theology. This is abundantly confessed by
such scholars as Gesenius, Rosenmuller, Stuart, Lucke, De Wette,
Neander; and it will hardly be challenged by any one who has
investigated the subject. But the Jewish theology being thus
impregnated with germs from the Persian faith, and being in a
sense the historic mother of Christian theology, it is far more
reasonable, in seeking the origin of dogmas common to Parsees and
Christians, to trace them through the Pharisees to Zoroaster, than
to imagine them suddenly foisted upon the former by forgery on the
part of the latter at a late period. Fourthly, it is notorious
that Mohammed, in forming his religion, made wholesale draughts
upon previously existing faiths, that their adherents might more
readily accept his teachings, finding them largely in unison with
their own. It is altogether more likely, aside from historic
evidence which we possess, that he drew from the tenets and
imagery of the Ghebers, than that they, when subdued by his armies
and persecuted by his rule from their native land, introduced new
doctrines from the Koran into the ancestral creed which they so
revered that neither exile nor death could make them abjure it.
For, driven by those fierce proselytes, the victorious Arabs, to
the mountains of Kirman