The religion of Zarathustra, on the other hand, did not maintain its primitive elevation. The prophet's Gāthās (p. 191) summoned the believer to live in the fellowship of the Good Mind and in obedience to the Most Excellent Order (_Asha vahista_), and the later Avesta seems sometimes to repeat their high demand: {222} "Purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good; that purity that is procured by the law of Mazda to him who cleanses his own self with good thoughts, words, and deeds." It is the utterance of Ahura himself. But purity may be interpreted in very different ways: the lad who walks about over fifteen years of age without the sacred girdle and sacred shirt, has no forgiveness, for he has "power to destroy the world of the holy spirit"; while, on the other hand, to pull down the scaffold on which corpses had been deposited (the Persians employed neither burial nor cremation) was to destroy a centre of impure contagion, and secure pardon for all sins. When Moses established the administration of justice at the sanctuary of Yahweh, he planted a powerful ethical influence in the heart of the religion of Israel. No reader of the Old Testament needs to be reminded of the prophetic rebukes of a monarch's crimes. Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, have become universal types. The history of Hebrew ethics shows how the conception of morality gradually passed from the regulation of external conduct into the inner sphere of thought; and the offender was no longer regarded merely as a member of a tribe or nation on which punishment might alight collectively; he stood in an immediate relation to his God. Primitive imagination could rest content with supposing that sin had first entered the world through the {223} subtlety of a talking snake. Later thought found such a solution inadequate to enlarged moral experience. In the figure of the Adversary or the Opposer, the Sâtân, first traceable in Israel's literature after the Captivity, Judaism admitted a moral dualism analogous to the opposition between Ahura Mazda and Añra Mainyu. The Sâtân had, indeed, no creative power, though hordes of demons were under his sway in the abyss, and were sent forth to do the desolating work of madness and disease. But he was the head of a realm of evil over against the sovereignty of God; and the intensity of the moral consciousness of sin was reflected in the mythologic form of his warfare against the hosts of heaven.