When the conquests of Cyrus released the Hebrews from captivity, the close relations established with the Persians wrought no change in this aspect of the Jewish faith. Mazdeism, in fact, was a religion so wholesome and practical in its character that asceticism could find little place among its prescribed observances, and the strict maintenance of its priesthood in certain families who transmitted their sacred lore from father to son, shows that no restrictions were placed upon the ministers of Hormadz, or athravas,[4] though in the later period of the Achæmenian empire, after the purity of ancient Mazdeism had become corrupted, the priestesses of the Sun were required to observe chastity, without necessarily being virgins.[5] With the conquests of Alexander, however, Judaism was exposed to new influences, and was brought into relation at once with Grecian thought and with the subtle mysticism of India, with which intercourse became frequent under the Greek empire. Beyond the Indus the Sankhya philosophy was already venerable, which taught the nothingness of life, and that the supreme good consisted in the absolute victory over all human wants and desires.[6] Already Buddha had reduced this philosophy into a system of religion, the professors of which were bound to chastity—a rule impossible of observance by the world at large, but which became obligatory upon its innumerable priests and monks, when it spread and established itself as a church, thus furnishing the prototype which was subsequently copied by Roman Christianity.[7] Already Brahmanism had invented the classes of Vanaprasthas, Sannyasis, and others—ascetics whose practices of self-mortification anticipated and excelled all that is related of Christian Antonys and Simeons—although the ancestor worship which required every man to provide descendants who should keep alive the Sraddha in honor of the Pitris of his forefathers postponed the entrance into the life of the anchorite until after he should have fulfilled his parental duties:[8] and we know from the references in the Greek writers to the Hindu gymnosophists how great an impression these customs had made upon those to whom they were a novelty.[9] Already the Yoga system had been framed, whereby absorption into the Godhead was to be obtained by religious mendicancy, penances, mortifications, and the severest severance of self from all external surroundings.[10] All this had been founded on the primæval doctrine of the Vedas with respect to the virtue of _Tapas_, or austere religious abstraction, to which the most extravagant powers were attributed, conferring upon its votaries the authority of gods.[11] With all the absurdities of these beliefs and practices, they yet sprang from a profound conviction of the superiority of the spiritual side of man’s nature, and if their theory of the nothingness of mortal existence was exaggerated, yet they tended to elevate the soul, at the expense, it