Statistical facts testify quite as strongly to the high standard of the Parsee race, and the practical results which follow from the observance of the Zoroastrian ritual. A small death-rate and a large proportion of children prove the vigorous vitality of a race. The Parsees have the lowest death-rate of any of the many races who inhabit Bombay. The average for the two years 1881 and 1882 per thousand was for Hindoos 26·11; for Mussulmans 30·46; for Europeans 20·18; for Parsees 19·26. The percentage of children under two years old to women between fifteen and forty-five was 30·27 for Parsees, as against Hindoos 22·24, and Mussulmans 24·9, showing incontestably greater vitality and greater care for human life. Of 6,618 male and 2,966 female mendicants in the city of Bombay, only five male and one female were Parsees. These figures speak for themselves. It is evident that a religion in which such results are possible cannot be unfavourable to the development of the ‘mens sana in corpore sano;’ and that, although we may not turn Zoroastrians, we may envy some of the results of a creed which inculcates worship of the good, the pure, and the beautiful in the concerns of daily life, as well as in the abstract regions of theological and philosophical speculation. CHAPTER XIV. FORMS OF WORSHIP. Byron’s lines—Carnegie’s description—Parsee nature-worship—English Sunday—The sermon—Appeals to reason misplaced—Music better than words—The Mass—Zoroastrianism brings religion into daily life—Sanitation—Zoroastrian prayer—Religion of the future—Sermons in stones and good in everything. Not vainly did the early Persian make His altar the high places and the peak Of earth-o’ergazing mountains, and thus take A fit and unwall’d temple, where to seek The spirit, in whose honour shrines are weak, Uprear’d of human hands. Come, and compare Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek, With nature’s realms of worship, earth and air, Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy prayer! _Childe Harold_, iii. 91. A shrewd Scotch-American ironmaster—Andrew Carnegie—in an interesting and instructive record of experiences during a voyage round the world, gives the following description of the worship of the modern Parsees, as actually witnessed by him at Bombay:— ‘This evening we were surprised to see, as we strolled along the beach, more Parsees than ever before, and more Parsee ladies richly dressed, all wending their way towards the sea. It was the first of the new moon, a period sacred to these worshippers of the elements; and here on the shore of the ocean, as the sun was sinking in the sea, and the slender silver thread of the crescent moon was faintly shining on the horizon, they congregated to perform their religious rites.