expects from all His creatures a reverential and sympathetic treatment of one another. The religion is Gospelless, it is coated over with gross superstitions, and it has the very great defect of being so elementary in its teaching that there is a strong tendency amongst its professors to deny revelation altogether, and to become simply rationalists. For all this the Zoroastrian Parsi possesses, as a rule, a strong moral character, which, when he becomes a Mohammedan, is almost always lost in a few generations. Unfortunately, the Behāī movement is just now attracting a large number of Zoroastrians, and is becoming a serious danger; for the Behāī, whatever he may say to the contrary, is really a Mussulman, and his system, in which opportunism takes the place of the doctrine of the growth of the moral law, retains most of the more serious defects of Islam. However, as the majority of the Yezdi Parsis are not likely to become Behāīs, it is a matter for congratulation that any European power that may have to solve the problem of establishing good government in Southern Persia will find ready to hand a considerable community of this intelligent and interesting people in at least one of the Persian towns. CHAPTER IV Results of Islam—Untruthfulness—Superstitions—Pilgrimages— Divining—_Jins_ and _dīvs_—The evil eye—Trivial commandments—Entertainments—Islam includes rather than controls the life—Two purposes better than one—Ceremonial uncleanness. It is now necessary for us to touch on some aspects of Mohammedanism in Yezd with which it was impossible to deal fully while sketching the essential system. In the last chapter we were primarily dealing with the religious ideas that had been brought to bear upon the country as influences, but in this chapter we shall speak rather more of their results. First of all, I should like to give two stories. I give the two, because one is the account of a conversation which I had with a man who was not an orthodox Shiah; and, although I fancy I have heard similar remarks made by men whose orthodoxy was unimpeachable, it is well to be on the safe side. I had been challenged to give my reasons for preferring Christianity to Mohammedanism, and in reply I gave an account of a conversation I had had with another Mohammedan only a day or two before. I had been trying to show him that lying was a sin, and he had replied to me: “It’s all very well for Ferangis to say that; but the fact is that they can’t tell lies, and we can.” I quoted this story simply as bringing out very forcibly a common Persian idea, for Persians trust Ferangis implicitly, not because they respect them, but because they believe they have a constitutional difficulty in telling lies. Having quoted it, I went on to say that as we all acknowledged in theory that truth-telling was right, it was reasonable to infer that a religion which had produced a mental constitution supposed to be incapable of falsehood,