forth at morning in his celestial chariot of fire."
This form of worship those curious in such matters may see on any
bright morning at Bombay, where whole crowds of Parsee men, women and
children rush out at sunrise to greet the king of day and offer up
their morning oblations. I was not surprised at the avowed preference
of my Parsee friends for out-door worship, since it is well known that
the ancient Persians not only permitted few temples to be erected to
their gods, and held in abhorrence all painted and graven images, but
they laid it to the charge of the Greeks, as a daring impiety, that
"they shut up their gods in shrines and temples, like puppets in a
cabinet, when all created things were open to them and the wide world
was their dwelling-place." It was probably religious zeal, even more
than revenge against the Greeks, that induced the burning of the
temple at Athens by Xerxes, led on, as he may have been, by the
fanatical zeal of the Magi who accompanied him.

Plutarch speaks of the Persians, in common with the Chaldeans and
Egyptians, as worshipers of the sun under the name of Mithra, whom
they regarded as standing between Ormuzd, "the author of good," and
Ahriman, "the author of evil," occupied alternately in aiding the
former and subduing the latter. So do the Parsees of our own day
regard him; and their only hope for the ultimate triumph of Ormuzd is
in constant sacrifices and prayers and propitiatory offerings to the
sun as the fire that is to burn out and utterly consume all evil
from our earth. Fire is to the Parsees now, as it has ever been, the
holiest of all holy things, carried about by princes and great men for
safety; by warriors, as that which is to give them the victory over
their foes; and by all, as their sole and ever-present deity. Sir
Jamsetjee assured me that the _intelligent_ Parsees regard the sun
and fire as only the symbols that are to remind them of the God
they worship. But there can be no doubt that the mass of the Parsees
literally worship the sun and the "sacred fire;" and hence arise the
utter repugnance many of them have to celebrating their religious
rites within closed walls, and the decided preference ever shown for
out-door worship. I have often heard them say that the Fire-god
shows his aversion to confinement by drooping when he is shut up, and
growing vigorous just in proportion as free scope is given him.
The sun appears everywhere on the shields and armor of the ancie